The Boy Who Watches Ships Go By

These photographs depict the pastoral landscape of Sunderland, a small coastal village outside of Lancaster, England. This region is admired worldwide as a paragon of rural English life and customs, but for centuries it has depended massively on maritime commerce, including the slave trade. Sunderland opened a slave port in the early 18th century that rapidly became one of the busiest such ports in England. A cabin boy, brought there from the West Indies in 1736, soon died from disease and was buried near the shore on unconsecrated ground. Sunderland later dwindled to a seaside bathing destination; “Sambo’s Grave,” as the boy’s burial spot is known, remains today a modest tourist attraction.