Whydah Gally: An Example Of A Museum

Whose history does museum represent? How do museums represent history? Museums are important places for history. The displays help us to discover who we are, and how we have come to be who we are. But the displays in museums do not just happen, just like all representations of history, whether in books, songs, oral accounts, or even collections of photographs and documents, they have been created and constructed by someone for a purpose. The purpose may be to inform, to challenge, to persuade, to argue or all of these. ‘Museums are not representations of the Other, but can be read as referential indices of the Self’ (p. 365). Museum is a representation of how one interprets the other. The maker of the display has made choices and exercised

Originally a slave ship, the Whydah Galley was captured by pirates and remained a pirate ship until its demise in 1717. After the discovery of the Whydah Gally in 1984, Barry Clifford wanted to open a museum commemorating the Whydah Gally as a pirate ship along with its artefacts in a museum so that people could witness the ship that is considered to be the first documented pirate ship to be found. However, he was soon faced with stark oppositions from the Black communities who felt that their history of being a slave was being downplayed by presenting the ship as a pirate ship. As such, the exhibition of the Whydah Gally became a controversial one. While trying to represent the ship in the museum in Tampa, it would have given credibility to the ship for being a pirate ship which would have ignored the ship’s connection to slavery. How will the museum represent history of the ship when the ship itself is controversial? If the museum was allowed to be created, it would have to represent something. As the title asks ‘Whose history?’ the same way the question of whose history is going to be represented in the museum came up. The ship did not only represent the event of piracy but also the event of slavery. If it displayed the ship as a pirate ship, it would have ignored the ship as a slave ship, but if it displayed the ship as a slave ship, Clifford’s childhood dream to show the pirate ship to the world would remain unfulfilled. Clifford

345). The Black communities felt that their history was being ignored. The Whydah Galley was a reminder of not only its existence as a pirate ship but also as a slave ship. The memory attached to slavery through the ship becomes a tool that can be used because it personalizes history in such a way that an individual can feel that they have a connection to the matters discussed. ‘How communities respond to how they see themselves being represented in historical/cultural museums and how these reactions are related to the representations themselves’ is evident through the collective memory that was shared between the Black communities. Memory, as such, is both on display and a response that draws on the individual history of the spectator. However, if the agony of the slavery past by a popular power has scarred Black memories up to the present day, there is no doubt that the making of a museum in such situations after the disruptive moment such a memory was firmly marked in the minds of the community. The history of the Blacks, as such, becomes a mere ‘myth’ while the history of the White becomes a