Sometime around 2011, when Lissa Paul was doing preliminary research on her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded biography of radical British author Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840), she was trying to find evidence of Eliza’s presence as a teacher and owner of the Seminary for Young Ladies (for the White daughters of the plantocracy) she ran in Barbados between 1815 and 1822 with her daughter. To that end, at the suggestion of Alissandra Cummins, Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Lissa began looking for Eliza’s presence in the pages of the local newspaper, The Barbados Mercury Gazette, which had published between 1783 and 1839.

As only the crumbling microfilm copies stored in the National Library in Bridgetown were accessible, Lissa read the paper issue-by-issue through the period when she knew Eliza was there.  That’s how Lissa found herself embedded, in what felt like real-time, in the horrific day-to-dayness of life in slave-dependant Barbados. The experience was more profoundly disturbing than any of the historical accounts Lissa had read. Besides the sadistic cruelty of enslavers evident on every page, Lissa was rivetted by the fugitive slave ads that appeared in each issue.  There she found compelling testimony to the resistance efforts of the enslaved, as well as the concrete evidence of their individuality, intelligence, persistence, agency and deep commitment to their families despite all the legislated efforts used to keep them enslaved. 

The microform copies of the Gazette were, however, extremely difficult to use. As they had been made on diazo (a medium not suited to long-term preservation), they were physically crumbling. Some pages had faded to a kind of gray mush and were completely unreadable.  As Lissa became increasingly conscious of the heroism of the people in the ads, she was also horrified to realize that if the microfilms disappeared, the evidence of the lives of those people would die too. With the physical newspapers locked and inaccessible in the National Archives in Barbados, Lissa worked towards support in Barbados for a digitization project. Eventually, Lissa was a co-applicant (along with Amalia Levi and Ingrid Thompson) on a successful British Library Endangered Archives Grant in 2017 to digitize the papers.          

 The Gazette, now available through both the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and the British Library joins a growing cluster of materials being used globally for research on resistance by enslaved people. The new project at the British Library, built by Graham Jevon on “Agents of Enslavement” is designed to discover more about who the people in the ads were and what they did. Our project is designed to support the construction of physical memorials for the people in both Canadian and Caribbean ads.      

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