Igbo Landing; The 1803 Mass Suicide of Igbo Slaves in Dundar Creek, St Simon Island, Georgia USA.
Igbo is one of the largest to tribes in Nigeria and they are well known for their resiliency, hard work, strong will, pride and independence, but that was not all that is known about them.
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During the Atlantic Slave trade, millions of Igbo people were sold to several parts of the world to work as slaves.
In May 1803, a group of Igbo slaves along with other enslaved West Africans arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on a slave ship named the Wanderer.
Like any other slave at that time, they were put up for sale and were purchased by slave merchants, John Couper and Thomas Spalding, for $100 each. (which is equivalent to $2,684.63 in 2023)
These slave merchants later resold them for profit to a plantation at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County,
En route to St Simons Island the slaves were chained and packed under the deck of a coastal vessel named the York.
But things didn't go as planned, the 75 enslaved Igbo people in the York ship revolted, in an act of great courage, led by a chief priest, they took over the ship all before walking into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek singing:
“Mmụọ mmiri du anyi bịa, mmụọ mmiri ga-edu anyi laghachi”
In the English language, it means:
"The water spirit brought us, the water spirit will take us home”.
This led to their captors drowning.
The site where this event occurred is today known as Igbo Landing.
It is called a 'landing' because the captives did not 'arrive' in America. The slave dealers brought them to America against their will.
Evidence
A documentary record which emphasized the brute financial loss and bad business practice the Igbo’s actions brought to their owners is available at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Roswell King, a White overseer on the nearby Pierce Butler plantation and founder of Roswell Manufacturing Company, now known as Roswell Mill, wrote the first account of the event:
“They took to the swamp”—committing suicide by walking into Dunbar Creek."
Rosewell and another man identified only as Captain Patterson recovered many drowned bodies. Only a subset of the 75 Igbo rebels drowned. Thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing, which made some believe that some of the enslaved people may have survived the suicide episode and escaped, making the actual number of deaths uncertain.
In the same documentary record, a slave dealer named William Mein said:
“The Eboes 'took to the marsh where they drowned.”
The death toll tallied ten to twelve captive Africans, plus a White overseer and two sailors.
St Simons native Annie Arnold (1844-1927) told Quaker musicologist and author of slave songs of the Georgia Sea Island, Lydia Parrish, how the Eboes preferred death to a life in captivity and walked into the creek singing,
'The water will take us away.’
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