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The Black Death's Legacy
The abandoned Ancient Britons had King Arthur. The downtrodden English peasants had Robin Hood. The persecuted Californians had Zorro.
The slaves of the Caribbean had the Black Death.
During times of hardship and despair, heroes always emerge, be they purely fictional or, at best, legendary.
The noble tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, for instance, often depict the jousting knights of the middle-ages when, in reality, the warlord he was based on probably lived much earlier.

Inspired by Joaquin Murrieta, the so-called ‘Mexican Robin Hood,’ Zorro is an entirely fictitious character. In reality, Murrieta was a brutal criminal who killed numerous people. However, according to some legends, he only became a bandit after he was beaten and his wife raped by soldiers. Romanticism further suggests that it wasn’t just cold-blooded revenge that Murrieta sought but that he fought for justice for indigenous people against the Anglo and Chinese-Americans who persecuted them.
In many ways, the real people these heroes are based on are not as crucial as their legacies.
The stories tell of men who were greater than mere mortals. But, it wasn’t their outstanding strength or phenomenal speed, or their magical swords or their incredible skill with a bow and arrow that mattered. What mattered was their nobility, their righteousness, their selflessness, their courage to stand up against the oppression of others, to lead with honour and with wisdom and with compassion.
Ultimately, the greatest legacy of any hero is the example they set to both their contemporaries and the generations that follow.
THE LEGEND OF THE BLACK DEATH
Receiving far less popular media attention than the likes of Robin Hood, to the African slaves of the Caribbean from the 18th Century onwards, the Black Death – a giant African, usually portrayed wielding a golden sword and dagger – nevertheless became that inspirational hero.
According to Caribbean legend, the Black Death was the last survivor of his tribe who, like thousands of others, was sold into slavery. But, unwilling to settle for such a life, he escaped and became a notorious pirate, cutting a swath of terror across the Caribbean as he attacked ships and settlements.
What’s so unusual about that?
In reality, nothing.
Except that, unlike most of the pirates of that era – Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, Bartholomew Roberts . . . Jack Sparrow – the Black Death was uninterested in gold and treasure.

He was bigger than that.
Better.
Nobler.
The Black Death’s sole purpose was to bring justice to the thousands of men, women and children who had been violently ripped from their home in Africa, to free them from their imprisonment and to make their white masters pay for what they had done.

However, some people would argue that there is no evidence that the Black Death ever really existed. There are, apparently, no official logs or reports that mention him, and most of the slaves were themselves illiterate, consigning the legend to oral retellings that have gradually faded with time to become little more than ghost stories.
Was the Black Death nothing but a story passed among oppressed, persecuted and often brutalised slaves, told to keep spirits up, to keep morale high?
Was he just a symbol of hope in a time of despair?
Or, just like King Arthur and Zorro, was there a man, a real-life, flesh and blood person whose life and exploits, whose legacy, became greater than his reality?
THE REALITY OF THE BLACK DEATH
I have identified two historical references which I believe support the Caribbean oral traditions about the Black Death.
Both describe encounters with ‘a giant, black pirate wielding a golden sword and dagger’.
The first is in the log of a Spanish treasure galleon, the San Jose.
On August 12, 1707, the San Jose was attacked and boarded by a ship whose captain matches the above description, off modern-day Florida.
The second reference is found in a letter written by a Jesuit missionary based on the southern tip of what would eventually become French Indochina, dated April 6 1712. Petitioning the French government to intervene to secure developing trade and business interests in the Gulf of Siam, in an example of the lawlessness he had witnessed, Alexandre de Rhodes described frequent attacks on settlements and ships by a pirate matching the Black Death’s description.
The distance between these sightings and the lack of further historical (i.e. written) evidence has led to criticism of my research paper. However, I highlight numerous examples of seafarers of the 18th Century traversing such distances (after all, regular commodities, including sugar, cotton, slaves and troops, shipped between the Old World and the New). Furthermore, we should not confine the discipline of archaeology to such reliance on historical evidence. As you will see below, incorporating other types of evidence into my theory validates the existence of the Black Death.
The Tuareg Evidence
Early on during our research into the Bouda, my father, Professor Reginald King, and I spent several months travelling with a group of Tuareg nomads around the Sahara.
The Tuareg are a fascinating people with a long, rich history which often varies between clans.
One of the oral traditions that our hosts regaled us with told of how, several hundred years ago, one of their parties fled a violent enemy and sought shelter in a great stone city deep in the heart of Africa. My father and I believed this city was the City of the Moon, an ancient settlement that the Bouda then occupied. According to the Tuareg, a prince, a man named Kha’um, fought and destroyed their enemies and offered them sanctuary.
As thanks, the Tuareg chieftain gave Kha’um a brass sword and dagger.
The Wassu Evidence

Standing apart from the main stone circles at Wassu, in the Gambia, my ancestral homeland, there is a solitary standing stone. But, unlike the others, which have been protected from interference by belief in a curse, it has been defaced by ‘graffiti’.
This graffiti is not some modern act of spray paint abusing youths but is a source of historical information, tentatively dated to c. 1800 CE. It is drawn primarily in red ochre, making it very difficult to see against the red coloured standing stone. The images depict a scene that is not uncommon in West Africa- people being dragged into slavery during the so-called black holocaust.
At Wassu, however, the imagery is linked to a folk tale that talks about the survivors of a great stone city in the continent’s heart who settled in the area after most of their tribe was captured by ‘white devils’- slave traders.
One, almost buried beneath overlapping images depicting men, women and children being herded like cattle onto a European ship, is of particular note. It is the figure of a man wearing a brightly coloured mask and holding what I interpret as a golden sword and dagger, drawn in the graffiti’s only example of yellow ochre.
The L'aile Raptor Evidence:
In 1705, Lieutenant Percival Lowe, of the HMS Swallow, made a log entry. He boarded the slave ship L’aile Raptor, found drifting off the coast of Jamaica. Onboard, he discovered that all but one of the human cargo – a giant Negro – had died of starvation because all the crew, save for the ship’s captain, had died of disease.
That captain, a British man named Edward Pryce, was found in his quarters, rocking back and forth like a madman, while holding a brightly coloured mask and murmuring these words over and over again- “Savage mumbo-jumbo, savage mumbo-jumbo . . .”
Lowe’s log doesn’t mention what happened to the ‘heathen’ as he put it. They admitted Pryce to the Hamark Asylum but no further mention is made of the mask.
The Hamilton Evidence
In 2014, a construction crew working on a new tourist complex just outside of Kingston in Jamaica stumbled upon an underground chamber they didn’t know was there.

The site they were working on had, during the 17th Century, been a sugar plantation with a large house attached to it but, records show that the entire property burned down in 1707.
The archaeologists who were called in to examine the underground chamber – the house’s wine cellar, they concluded – found, among the racks of bottles, the remains of three humans and a very battered notebook.
The notebook was in fact a diary belonging to Emily Hamilton, the daughter of the plantation’s owner. In it, she talks about a slave who saved her when she had an accident during the annual burning of the sugar crop. She convinced her father to make him her manservant and, over the next year, she mentions him several times, consistently referring to him as ‘My Hero’.
Most of the diary is just the prittle-prattle of a young English girl living on a Caribbean island during the eighteenth century, attending dinners and parties, making eyes with Mr Darcy-wannabes, that sort of thing.
But, of relevance, she narrates the somewhat fanciful adventures of her ‘Hero’ and describes his ancestral home as a city built of stone and ruled by a Great King who wore a magical mask that could show him the future.
The last entry is made on the 14th May 1707.
It’s a perfectly normal account of a perfectly normal day, just like any that came before it.
Except for the fact that only two-thirds of her way through the book, Emily Hamilton makes no further entries.
It is also the day that the Hamilton estate on Jamaica was burned to the ground, tragically along with every member of the family, and every one of their slaves and servants.
There are no records of what caused the fire, only that nothing was left.
CONCLUSION: THE BLACK DEATH'S LEGACY
As far as I have been able to ascertain, given the limited information to work from, there is no mention of the Black Death before the 14th May 1707.
My theory is thus: Kha’um was the Oni, the Great King, of the Bouda who possessed a brass sword and dagger, given to him by Tuareg refugees and which, I propose, in the heat of battle could easily be mistaken as gold. As Oni, he was also initiated into the Moon Mask’s sacred cult (see my blog).
In 1705, along with most of his tribe, Kha’um was captured by Captain Edward Pryce and transported aboard the L’aile Raptor to the New World. However, the entire crew succumbed to a tropical disease and the slaves starved to death on the journey. Kha’um was the only slave to survive and was sold to the Hamilton Sugar plantation, while Edward Pryce was admitted to a mental asylum.
After approximately one year as a slave on the plantation, Kha’um saved Emily Hamilton during some freak accident and was ‘promoted’ to a house slave. Emily wrote down a glorified history of his life until, on the 14th May 1707, a fire destroyed the Hamilton plantation and Emily was killed while taking refuge in the wine cellar.
Kha’um, having either started the fire or taking advantage of it, escaped, commandeered a ship and, perhaps fuelled by him being the survivor of a plague ship, he became known as the ‘Black Death.’
But was he the selfless, noble hero of Caribbean folk law? Or, like anyone else, was he merely a man with his dreams, desires and ambitions, which became glorified in such dark times?
I believe that it is the latter.
While the Tuareg account certainly portrays Kha’um as bold and kind, I do not believe he was the selfless hero of legend. Instead, he was, in fact, a man who became obsessed with finding all the pieces of the Moon Mask so that he could fulfil an ancient prophecy, travel back in time and save his tribe from annihilation. However, his daring feats were passed among the slave population of the Caribbean exaggerated and glorified.

Thus they elevated him onto the pedestal of a hero.
To the descendants of those slaves, that is his legacy. His real legacy, however, I believe is somewhat less clear.
Suppose he succeeded in finding even a single piece of the Moon Mask. In that case, his real legacy is the rewriting of human history, the revelation of civilisation’s origins, and the endorsement of the Progenitor Theory.
And that is why this legendary character has become so entwined with my career and my life.
** Amendment- since writing this post, an osteo-archaeological study of the human remains found in the Hamilton wine cellar suggest that they are all male. This raises the question: what happened to Emily Hamilton?**