Schooner La Amistad's history remembered with new marker in Montauk

East End historians have unveiled a marker commemorating the local connection to the schooner La Amistad, 184 years after the U.S. Navy seized the ship off Montauk with illegally enslaved Africans onboard.

The 53 Africans stood trial for mutiny but eventually won their freedom in a case the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1841.

The blue-and-yellow state historical marker, funded through the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, briefly summarizes how the Africans subdued their captors on the ship, came ashore and were jailed in Connecticut before going free.

The historical marker was dedicated at a ceremony Saturday on the beach at Montauk's Culloden Point near where the ship landed in 1839.

Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African American Museum, said that the story of La Amistad is an important part of Black history that should continue being told at a time in the United States when she feels some people are “trying to erase" Black history.

“We’re making a strong effort to make sure that our history and all our contributions to this world is being written,” she said. 

Georgette Grier-Key, executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor, expressed a similar idea.

“What serves us is the truth, and for us to continue to examine that truth and the unsung heroes that rise out of these stories,” she said in an interview.

In 1998, the Eastville Community Historical Society dedicated a memorial to La Amistad near Montauk Point Lighthouse. A storm destroyed another marker near Culloden Point several years ago, according to historians.

The La Amistad story began in February 1839 when Portuguese slave hunters abducted a group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Cuba with the intention of trading them into slavery, according to the National Archives.

Two Spanish plantation owners, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, bought the 53 Africans, who were put aboard La Amistad.

But on July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship and ordered the plantation owners to sail east back toward Africa. However, the plantation owners steered north at night, ultimately leading the ship to Long Island's coast.

After seizing La Amistad, the U.S. Navy brought the ship and the Africans, who spoke no English, to Connecticut — which then still allowed slavery.

The Africans stayed imprisoned while the court system decided if they were property, according to the National Archives.

Former President John Quincy Adams represented the Africans in the nation's highest court, presenting the case “as a test of the American republic’s sincerity in the ideals it espoused abroad,” according to a summary by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian.

The court ruled the Africans were free people and never had been slaves, freeing them, the summary says.

Grier-Key, who called the beach at Culloden Point "sacred ground," said weekend events that coincided with the marker's dedication highlighted the importance "that Amistad happened here in Montauk."

The Montauk Historical Society teamed with the organizations Simmons and Grier-Key lead to host a panel discussion in Sag Harbor where they incorporated clips of the 1997 Oscar-nominated movie “Amistad," directed by Steven Spielberg.

“There’s a lot of really interesting history in Montauk, but this is something not a lot of people know about,” said Mia Certic, the Montauk Historical Society's executive director.

By Joe Werkmeister

joe.werkmeister@newsday.com

Joe Werkmeister covers the towns of Southampton, East Hampton and Shelter Island. He is a graduate of St. Bonaventure University and previously worked as the editor of two North Fork community newspapers.

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