Joseph Rachell (1716-66) and the Slave and Free Coloured Cemetery at Fontabelle on the Outskirts of Historic Bridgetown

By, Dr. Tara Inniss, Department of History and Philosophy, Cave Hill Campus, UWI

Joseph Rachell (1716-66) has been regarded as the first black businessman in Barbados -- although it can be argued that many enslaved and free black men and women had to be enterprising in slave society in order to secure their own survival -- but Joseph Rachell certainly stands out as an enigma of his time.

He was baptized at St. Michael’s at the age of 10 years and was described as a “free nego boy.” He began trading around 1740. He owned a small fleet of fishing boats and several properties in Bridgetown. He was a member of St. Michael’s Church, but was buried in the Old Churchyard which is now St. Mary’s.

Joseph Rachell was also a generous supporter of the black community in 18^th century Bridgetown. He purchased a plot of land in Fontabelle (now the location of the Barbados Investment Development Corporation Small Business Centre) where the urban enslaved and free coloured populations could bury their dead. One of our best insights into enslaved burial rites comes from an observer, Robert Poole, who witnessed the burial of a child there in the mid-18^th century.[1]

A Slave Burial at Fontabelle c. 1748

In 1748, a visiting physician wrote about a funeral for an infant on a Saturday evening (after the work day was over and Sunday was a day off). He described his encounter with a procession of several “Negroes” accompanying a small coffin to Fontabelle where the infant was to be buried. He reported that there was music and singing in the procession with participants jiggling shells and stones as well as beating stones together.  The lively crowd grew: “many running to them from other Parts [of the city], and join’d in their Mirth.”*

In the slave community, the conferral of funeral rites for a departed member did not require participants to be related or know the deceased personally. He commented that the enthusiastic participants had a duty to send the child off to “its own Country [Africa}” where freedom awaited departed Africans and their enslaved descendants. The procession was not mournful in this respect. Death or release from this world was often seen as a joyous event. Similar descriptions of African slave funerals persisted into the early 19^th century and after emancipation funerals were large community-based events.

*Poole, Robert. The Beneficient Bee; or the Traveller’s Companion. 1753, p. 295

Rescue archaeology was carried out in the early 2000s by a team of archaeologists from UWI and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society before the site suffered the ravages of modern development. There is now a small plaque memorialising the lives of Bridgetown's enslaved and free coloured communities. 

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[1] Sean Carrington et al., A-Z of Barbados Heritage  (Oxford: Macmillan, 2003). 175.