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Igbo Landing

Igbo Landing (alternatively written as Ibo Landing, Ebo Landing, or Ebos Landing) is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. It was the setting of a mass suicide in 1803 by captive Igbo people who had taken control of their slave ship and refused to submit to slavery in the United States. The event's moral value as a story of resistance towards slavery has symbolic importance in African Americanfolklore and literary history.
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History
Further information: Slave Coast of West Africa and Igbo people in the Atlantic slave trade

In May 1803 a shipload of captive West Africans, upon surviving the middle passage, were landed by U.S.-paid captors in Savannah by slave ship, to be auctioned off at one of the local slave markets. The ship's enslaved passengers included a number of Igbo people from what is now Nigeria.

The Igbo were known by planters and slavers of the American South for being fiercely independent and resistant to chattel slavery.[3][4] The group of 75 enslaved Igbo people were bought by agents of John Couper and Thomas Spalding for forced labor on their plantations in St. Simons Island for $100 each.[5]

The chained enslaved people were packed under the deck of a small vessel named The Schooner York[1][2] to be shipped to the island (other sources say the voyage took place aboard The Morovia[6]). During this voyage the Igbo slaves rose up in rebellion, taking control of the ship and drowning their captors, in the process causing the grounding of the Morovia in Dunbar Creek at the site now locally known as Igbo Landing.[7]

The following sequence of events is unclear, as there are several versions of the revolt's development, some of which are considered mythological.

Apparently the Africans went ashore and subsequently, under the direction of a high Igbo chief among them, walked in unison into the creek singing in the Igbo language "The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home".

They thereby accepted the protection of their god Chukwu and death over the alternative of slavery.[7] Roswell King, a white overseer on the nearby Pierce Butler plantation (Butler Island Plantation), wrote one of the few contemporary accounts of the incident, which states that as soon as the Igbo landed on St. Simons Island they took to the swamp, committing suicide by walking into Dunbar Creek.[4]

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