Description
The young son of a “King” on St. Christopher’s (St. Kitts), Tegramund, a young boy, was brought to England after his parents were either killed or fled from European conquest of the island. The boy was saved by Ralph Merrifield, who purportedly brought him to England to raise as his own. Merrifield, a London merchant, is listed as the owner of the Gift of God, the ship on which Thomas Warner sailed to St. Kitts to establish the plantation. After the Kalinago genocide of 1626 and the island’s partitioning between competing European settlements, Warner went on to import thousands of African slaves, placing him at the very heart of the early slave trade and demonstrating the relationship between the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples””and theft of their lands”” and the stolen labour of Africans. He died in 1649 having amassed wealth equivalent to over £100 million today. Since we have no specific location for Tegramund (or, indeed, for Merrifield), we have placed this flag on Warner’s Suffolk home village of Parham. We’re not sure exactly when Tegramund arrived other than that it was in the late 1620s.
Bibliographic sources
Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 100.