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Skull
Island on Mermentau River
A Slave Ship's Inhumanity By
W. T. Block | |
Back
in 1949 my Uncle Austin Sweeney of Nederland, TX who was born and reared in Grand
Chenier, LA., told me the story of a slaver captains inhumanity so bestial, that
it is difficult for the human mind to comprehend it. It was the story of 200 starving
African slaves abandoned on a marsh ridge on Mermentau River, where they were
left to die horrific deaths.
Recently I have been in email communication
with Butch Guidry of Big Lake, Cameron Parish, LA who told me the same stories
had passed down through his family. Among the rivers old-timers, the island name
was a racial slur, but Guidry noted that the location a century ago appeared on
the rivers maps as Negro Island. He added that the slave ship captain had pondered
going upriver to Lake Arthur, but fearing he might be arrested there, he chose
to dump his cargo ashore and return to the gulf. For my own convenience, I have
renamed the location as Skull Island.
In 1964 I carried my mother and
some of her Sweeney siblings back to Grand Chenier for a visit. While there, I
asked my Cousin Jim Bonsall, who owned a small store, if he had ever heard of
that island. He quickly answered yes - that he could rent a boat and take me there
if I so chose. Guidry described Skull Island as being located at the north end
of Grand Lake, where the Mermentau enters the lake...
In
1968, while researching a graduate paper at Lamar University about the African
slave trade, I learned that the last known American slave ship to leave the Congo
River in Mar. 1865 was the Huntress, a topsail hermaphrodite schooner with a capacity
of 200 slaves. Hence since the voyage from the Congo River of Africa to Louisiana
would require over 2 months, it has always intrigued me whether or not the slave
ship in the Mermentau might have been the Huntress.
Uncle Austin added
that the slaver captain stopped at Grand Chenier in May, 1865, and sought to buy
rice or cattle from Dr. Millidge McCall to feed to his African chattels. McCall
told him that there were neither rice nor cattle to be purchased at Grand Chenier;
the residents of the Chenier at that time, consisting of women, children and a
few old men, were only a notch above starvation themselves as the Civil War had
just ended. McCall told the slaver too that the North had just won the war, and
the slaves had been freed. {The Texas Juneteenth
did not apply in Louisiana.}
My
uncle also told me that in March, 1867, my great uncle, John W. Sweeney, Jr.,
and my grandfather, James Hill Sweeney, had sailed a sloop up the river in search
of a high marsh ridge, where they might put in a crop of cotton. When they anchored
at Skull Island, they found scattered among the marsh grass countless skulls,
skeletons, and leg bones, each of the latter still shackled by a rusting leg iron
to the skeleton lying beside it. Sensing the aura of death which permeated the
marsh ridge, the Sweeneys quickly hoisted their sail and returned to Grand Chenier.
Dr. McCall also told the slaver captain that occasionally an offshore
Union blockader sailed up to Grand Chenier, seeking blockade-runners that were
hiding in the river. McCall and the slaver captain each knew that if a slave ship
were caught with Africans aboard, the slaver captain would be tried for violating
the 1820 African Slave Trade Act, the penalty of which was a charge of piracy
and death by hanging.
Without a doubt the shackled and starving Africans
on Skull Island died quickly, abetted by the countless mosquito bites, and perhaps
they were eaten by the numerous black panthers, which according to Grandma Sweeney,
frequented the sea cane marshes around Grand Chenier during Civil War days.
For decades the site of Skull Island was avoided like the plague by the sailors
who plied Mermentau River on the schooners and steamboats. And many superstitious
people often repeated tales around the camp fires, that during a full moon the
slave ghosts danced under the live oak trees on the marsh Chenier. And surely
there is no greater tale of bestiality "of mans inhumanity to man"than the story
of those unfortunate Africans who died on that island. | | |
