55th Annual Delaware Show

his business interests. The duplicate mention of “Gold Coast” on two of the drawers offers the best evidence of the cabinet’s use as an organizational tool. The Gold Coast, an area of Africa in what is now Ghana, was an active site of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. The labels “Gold Coast” and “Gold Coast Answered” suggest that the owner had enough correspondence from this region to fill two compartments and perhaps conducted more business there than in any of the other port or colony represented. In addition to indicating geographic locations, the top drawer of the cabinet, furthest to the left, is labeled “Policys of Insurance.” Filed away were, undoubtedly, insurance policies penned in ink on sheets of handmade paper. Winterthur’s manuscript collection holds several such examples issued to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchants to protect ships and cargo with significant monetary value. Like insurance today, these policies covered loss or damage to capital. Because their cargo often included enslaved humans, merchants involved in the Atlantic trade obscured the language in these documents to ensure full protection. Rather than displaying such an insurance policy next to the double cabinet in the exhibition Truths of the Trade: Slavery and the Winterthur Collection (fig. 4), the student curators chose a shipping receipt attributed to prominent Newport, Rhode Island, merchants Aaron Lopez and Jacob R. Rivera. The receipt would have fit into the cabinet drawers, but the desire to include the document originated from a graduate student’s ongoing research into Lopez and his transatlantic ventures. In fact, several of the decisions made by the students were shaped by not only their own research but that of others as well. The curators featured a telescope in the exhibition after hearing Dr. Louis Nelson speak about the dual use of the instrument for both Fig. 4. Student exhibition in the Society of Winterthur Fellows Gallery. — 146 —