From Unforgotten: Connecticut’s Hidden History of Slavery
More than two centuries ago, the enslaved man was sold to a slave holder in New Haven, Connecticut, who prepared to embark on an ambitious expedition to the Far East on board the ship Neptune.
He asked Bristol to join him.
“Dick’s conditional promise of freedom was that if he went on this trip, about three to four years, then he would have been free,” Jason Thomas says.
Thomas, 15, is a student at James Hillhouse High School in New Haven. His history class studied ship logs and archival documents to help piece together, for the first time, the story of Dick Bristol….
While plenty has been written about the Neptune’s voyage, the enslaved men aboard the ship have received far less attention from historians. The crew would depart from New Haven Harbor and trade seal skins for silk and tea.
Hillhouse students discovered that Bristol’s journey would end prematurely.
“After about a year he was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. They’re treating me worse than they did in New Haven.’ So he saw this ship,” Thomas says. “It was only about a football field away. He didn’t know how to swim, but he jumped off the ship and he tried to swim over there.”
No one knows what happened to Dick Bristol after that.
