By 1865 Barbados had been free of slavery for twenty-seven years. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 had taken effect on the island in 1834, and the four-year apprenticeship period that followed had ended in 1838. The emigrants who boarded the brig CORA at Bridgetown Harbour were not fugitives but free citizens — literate, propertied, and organised.

The voyage was the work of an institution. London Bourne, born enslaved in Bridgetown around 1793 and one of the wealthiest merchants in the city by the 1830s, had co-founded the Fatherland Union Barbados Emigration Society alongside Samuel Jackman Prescod, the leading Afro-Barbadian civil-rights reformer of the era. The Society was revived on 10 March 1865 with Bourne's son-in-law, Anthony Barclay, as Chairman. Twenty-seven days later the CORA sailed.

Read about London Bourne, the architect of the voyage →