Captivity on Board the Gideon: Reconstructing Histories of Enslavement and Resistance on a 17th-Century Dutch Slaver

When the slaver Gideon arrived in New Amsterdam on August 15, 1664, it had 153 enslaved men and 137 enslaved women on board. They had been brought to what was then still the Dutch colony New Netherland by Simon Cornelissen Gilde, who had been contracted by the West India Company. With the Gideon, Gilde had already forcefully transported as many as 1,233 people across the Atlantic. In fact, when he left West Central Africa in early 1664 he had 421 African captives on board, many of whom would not survive the journey. Yet, we know very little about these people and their circumstances on board the ship. The lived experiences of enslaved men, women, and children on board seventeenth-century Dutch ships has received barely any scholarly attention.

Following the important work of among others Katherine McKittrick, Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, and Saidiya Hartman, this work attempts to reconstruct the lived experiences of enslaved women, men, and children on board these seventeenth-century Dutch ships. One of the challenges in reconstructing their experiences results from the limited surviving written sources that can help us do so. This paper, then, supplements the archival sources with spatial analysis of these spaces of enslavement when addressing some of the following questions: Where on these ships were these men, women, and children held captive? How were they restrained and surveilled by the captain and his crew? And how would they have understood and navigated these spaces? This paper is a first exploration of the ways in which spatial analysis can help reconstruct the lived experiences of the people who were transported on board on seventeenth-century Dutch ships, and on the Gideon in particular.