This event took place on 21 May 2026.
Abstract
Following slavery, the indentureship system in the Caribbean operated from 1838 until 1917. One of the first ships to make the crossing from India to the Caribbean was John Gladstone’s Hesperus, carrying 170 migrants and arriving in British Guiana on 5th May 1838, a date now celebrated every year in Guyana as Arrival Day. Theophilus Richmond was the surgeon on the ship – The First Crossing is the published text of his journal on board.
This seminar will not only give an overall context for the journal, but will primarily be focused on the Black slave who appears in Richmond’s work. As a quintessential example of a subaltern subject, at once enigmatic, paradoxical and emotive, his elusive presence has changed our understanding of the history of the creolization process, the encounter between Indian indentured migrants and the formerly enslaved Africans, in Guyana.
The seminar will read short extracts from the work, discuss the form and content, and also view documents from the archive relevant to the journey.
Speaker biography
Dr Mark Tumbridge read English at Brunel University, Uxbridge, graduating in 2005 with a first class honours degree. He spent two years teaching in London and Poland, before returning to Brunel to complete his MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture. In July 2008, he won the inaugural David Nicholls Memorial Trust Scholarship, and by July 2012 he had successfully defended his PhD thesis in Comparative Cultural Studies at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick.
His research interests include Caribbean literature and culture, world literature, literary representations of indentureship and slavery, critical theory, and the presence of tropical products such as opium and sugar in literature.
He is currently lecturing at the University of Guyana.