![\"(Illustration](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/10\/BBCH-CROMARTIN-06-f36117c.png?quality=90&resize=619%2C413\" "\\"BBCH-CROMARTIN-06\\"\/")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>The first British entrep\u00f4t anywhere in Africa, it bore a famous name, Cormantin. At first it was used for trading gold, ivory and exotica, but then its commerce became people. In 1663, King Charles II <\/a>granted a charter to the Company of Royal Adventurers (later the Royal African Company), giving it monopoly rights over the slave trade in which Britain would become a key mover. The exact site was long uncertain, but now here it was.<\/p>\n Under the earth were a wall, a brick drain, a gun flint, broken bits of 17th-century tobacco pipes, the spouts and necks of glazed tableware. Everyday fragments from one of history\u2019s greatest crimes. The find took me back nearly 40\u00a0years. Back then, I was making a series that told a slavery story \u2013 pioneering in those days, when Britain\u2019s role in emancipation was the thing that was stressed.<\/p>\n We were looking at a group of Afro-Caribbean families in Leicester who had come to the UK in the 1950s from the island of Barbuda, a desolate, almost waterless place north of Antigua. From the late 1600s till emancipation, and after, the island was owned by the Codrington family (who founded the All Souls College Library in Oxford, and built a grand country estate at Dodington Park in Gloucestershire). The tiny island was later part of the British Leeward Island Federation and eventually became independent in 1981. But in the 1950s, in the wake of the Windrush, many Barbudan families migrated to Leicester, which was the hometown of the English parish priest on Barbuda, a Father Milburn. They are still there today.<\/p>\n The thing that distinguishes the Barbudan story is the Codrington archive: the single most important archive on the history of slavery, and one of the most extraordinary in British history. In over 8,000 papers \u2013 letters, maps, deeds inventories, notebooks and surveys \u2013 are the records of the Barbudan people from 1668 to emancipation and after (the last document is from 1944).<\/p>\n In 1980, the Codrington family decided to sell the collection, which they did in an auction at Sotheby\u2019s that December, to a private buyer with interests in the oil deposits off the island (why the British government didn\u2019t bid is a moot point). But after negotiating with the buyer\u2019s lawyers and getting clearance from HM Customs and Excise, I was able to film the archive in a bonded warehouse under the flight path at Heathrow. Looking back it was like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.<\/em><\/p>\n\n