Ya'll remember Malcolm X's famous phrase, "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us!," right?
Well, it turns out that might not be exactly accurate.
According to the Washington Post, in the early 1980s, a Plymouth Colony document listing “Abraham Pearse, blackamore" as one of the colony's residents in 1643 was found.
"Blackamore" is a derivative of black Moor, and was used at the time to describe people who had North African roots and had become servants or slaves in Europe. This discovery was somewhat complicated, however, by the fact that other records showed that Pearse was not an enslaved man, and that he had voted and owned land.
Further research into the matter raised even more doubts.
“The genealogical record does not support the assertion that Abraham Pearse was African,” noted Richard Pickering, deputy executive director of Plimoth Plantation, which is a museum dedicated to the Pilgrims of 1620.
DNA tests were done to put the matter to bed once and for all.
“We can say with virtual certainty that the father of Abraham and his ancestors on the male Pearse line are not of African descent,” radiologist Brad Pierce told WBUR in a 2011 radio interview. “The DNA suggests that it has a characteristic that suggests they are of Scandinavian descent.”
One problem with the DNA tests, however, is that researchers didn't look into the heritage of Pearse's mother. She could have been black.
After the DNA results came in, another discovery was made: experts looking at the document realized that the "blackamore" next to Pearse's name was a misprint. Instead, the word should have appeared one line below where it currently sits.
It may be that Pearse owned a slave, or that the word referred to another black man in the colony.
Eugene Aubrey Stratton, a former historian general of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, believes the mysterious black Pilgrim could have been a man known only as Hercules.
Lending some weight to Stratton's theory is the fact that Hercules had no last name. Also, according to Pickering, "many Africans were given classical names by the English” at that time; it was the fashionable thing to do.
Hercules first appears by name in official documents from a 1643 court case. Hercules stood before a court so it could decide how long a man named William Hatch could keep him as an indentured servant. (It was decided that Hercules would have to work for six years, and then "they would be free of each other.”)
Hercules wasn't the only black man in Plymouth at the time. Other records show “John Pedro a Neger and aged 30,” who apparently came to the New World on a ship called the Swan in 1623.
Later records show the black population of the colony increasing, and mention a black female maid, a man named Robert Trayes and "a Negro named Jethro" who was captured by Native Americans.
“It is not possible to tell how many blacks might have been in Plymouth Colony, for they would usually appear in records only when involved in some kind of legal situation,” Stratton said. “But gradually it can be seen that the black population was growing.”
We may never know if there were any black people on the Mayflower, but there were definitely black people at Plymouth. Thankfully, the search for the truth will continue!
