Times of the Islands Fall 2018

A freediver-in-training visits the collapsed Thunderdome from the French TV game show “Le trésor de Pago Pago” that was filmed at Malcolm’s
Road Beach in Providenciales in the early 1990s.
AGILE LEVIN
to apnea (breath holding), oxygen deprivation and water
pressure at great depths through repeated and prolonged
immersion.
According to Dr. Kevin Dawson, Professor of History
at the University of California, Merced, “Many [African divers]
could dive ninety-plus feet deep. How divers acquired
their abilities is unclear. But the lung capacity and the
composure required to work at such depths suggest that
they had learned to swim at an early age. When diving,
many held rock weights to help them descend quickly
without expending valuable air.” Although slave traders
did not understand the physiological process and
changes, Professor Dawson notes, the traders specifically
targeted ethnic groups of Africans for capture in riverine
areas.
When the African slave divers arrived in the Caribbean,
however, the slave masters could not be quite as brutal
as in the case of the Native Indians. The premium cost for
African slave divers required better management of the
investment, so divers received more rest time and fewer
beatings. The dependency on slave divers fostered a complex
relationship of power and privilege. In one telling
account, slave masters frequently rewarded African slave
divers with a glass of wine and a pipe of tobacco between
dives. Of course, slaveholders conferred favors to extract
more labor, and in turn more wealth from the slave divers.
Historians refer to this as “privileged exploitation”
that gave the African slave divers a measure of influence
over their situation that most other slaves did not have.
In her research of enslaved pearl divers of 16th
century Caribbean, Dr. Molly A. Warsh, Professor at the
University of Pittsburgh, studied their bargaining power.
She writes, “Although pearl divers performed exceedingly
dangerous work and endured difficult living conditions,
evidence suggests that they nonetheless managed to
exert considerable control over their own mobility, as well
as a degree of control over the pearls they were forced
to harvest. The divers frequently kept pearls for themselves,
either hoarding them or trading them for food
and other necessities.” In some cases, slave divers were
able to purchase freedom, leveraging the very expertise
that prompted their enslavement, in yet another irony, to
secure liberation.
During the initial period of colonization in the first half
of the 16th century, Native Indian and African slave divers
generated the greatest wealth in the Americas, Professor
Dawson points out. When the Spanish discovered the
rich silver mines in Bolivia and Mexico in the mid-1500s,
Times of the Islands Fall 2018 37