USS Wyandotte - Ship - Key West

I was playing with how to visually tell this story. I worked on it in the Metal Type Two-Day Class at the International Printing Museum in Los Angeles.

"A very touching incident occurred at the Barracoons, on the arrival of the Wyandotte with her prize. The negroes had been landed and quartered in the Barracoons some weeks before the second cargo arrived. As the Wyandotte's boats, filled with negroes from the second prize, approached the shore, all the other negroes crowded down to see them land. A woman in one of the boats was singing a sort of lament, or melancholy song, about her home and children, when suddenly she heard herself answered from the shore. She started up in wild amazement—listened—then sang the strain again, and again was answered by the same song from the shore. Now a third time in a louder, clearer, higher tone she sang her song, and the next moment beheld on the beach her three children rushing to meet her and singing their African home-song to tell her they were near. They had been separated from each other, taken to different parts of the coast of Africa, shipped in different vessels, and now, by a strange incident, were united in the most unexpected manner. Their meeting is said to have been so affecting that every one who witnessed it, negroes, officers and all, wept, many of them aloud. The poor Afri[ca]n wome[n] are devotedly and tenderly attach[ed to their] children, and the love of an Afr[ican] mother is the deepest and most sac[red part of] his nature. The joy of the poor [woman on] meeting her children again must have been sufficient to melt the hardest heart."