The Ship of Departure

The ship carries some fifteen hundred square metres of sail on three masts. The marine timber work was prefabricated in Normandy, at the Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue shipyard, following eighteenth-century carpentry practice, then shipped and assembled on the beach at Ouidah. The project is led by the National Agency for the Promotion of Heritage and Tourism Development.

It carries the name of L'Aurore, one of the ships that took captives from this coast. Several French vessels bore that name across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sources differ as to which one the replica reproduces. We prefer to say so rather than decide in their place: what is certain is the type of ship, and what it carried.

The interest of the place is not in the technical feat. It is in the between-decks. There, in a space where one cannot stand upright, women, men and children were laid down for two to three months of crossing. A text can describe it. A body entering that space understands it differently.

The ship is the centrepiece of a larger whole, the Marina of Ouidah complex, intended to bring together memorial gardens, an esplanade and cultural facilities, and to which the future International Museum of Memory and Slavery, housed in the Portuguese Fort at Docomè, is attached.

For the diaspora, the geography is everything. The Slave Route leads from the Auction Square to the Door of No Return. The ship stands just beyond that door. It occupies the exact place of what awaited the captives on the other side of the threshold, and which the memorial route could until now only name.