I am writing to counterbalance what I believe to be totally unfair criticism of Hannah Bradbury’s exhibition at the Dartmouth Museum.

Firstly, Ms Bradbury, as curator of the museum, is only able to use the information and artifacts in the museum’s collection, so anything outside of this cannot be displayed, hence any reference to the exploits of the Barbary pirates would have been irrelevant.

Secondly, the exhibition relates solely to Dartmouth’s links with the East India Company and the slave trade and is not meant to detail a comprehensive study of the history of human trafficking.

However, Ms Bradbury, as curator of the exhibition, must take a completely neutral stance in this matter and I feel that it is up to me to attempt to put some perspective into what appears to be disputed facts on the history of the slave trade in general.

Ceri Jayes mentions the 580 vessels taken by the Barbary pirates, which may be so, but this pales into insignificance when placed against the 12.5 million Africans transported to the New World as slaves or the 1.8 million who died making the journey.

There is also some dispute over the number of southern USA families who owned slaves. Ms Jayes quotes five per cent but the 1860 US census lists the figure at 32 per cent. There is little doubt that slavery was the foundation of the southern states’ economy.

Ms Jayes also alludes to 20 per cent of freed slaves who, themselves, owned slaves.

This may be true but it must be remembered that a large number of these transactions were in respect of individuals ‘buying back’ family members who they had been separated from and these, of course, cannot be accurately counted as slaves.

The records of such transactions did not include information as what happened to those who were ‘bought back’, so it is impossible to quantify the number who continued as slaves.

Ms Jayes concludes that we cannot learn from history if we ‘airbrush’ it but this appears to be exactly what she is trying to do here.

Ms Bradbury, could have, with the right exhibits, information and much larger premises, focused also on how poor whites fared at the time, but this does not relate to the purpose of the exhibition, which was purely and simply to show the relationship between Dartmouth, the East India Company and the slave trade.

Barrie Fishman

Northville Park, Kingsbridge