1817

1817 is a possible, not confirmed, birth year for Washington Black. It belongs to an account of his origins that places his birth aboard an illicit Dutch vessel during an Atlantic crossing and says his mother died in childbirth; Washington later sets it beside the competing report that he was born on a Barbados estate in 1818, without claiming certainty about either version.

The Competing Accounts

In his retrospective account, Washington says he was told that he was born in 1818 on a sun-scorched estate in Barbados. He had also heard that he was born in the autumn of 1817, in a shackled cargo hold aboard an illicit Dutch vessel crossing the Atlantic. The two versions differ in date and setting, and the second makes his mother’s death in childbirth part of his earliest history.

Memory and Uncertainty

Washington does not resolve the contradiction by choosing one story. For years, he says, he gave neither account priority. In his first years as a free man, he experienced dreams and flashes of images of a walled slave fort, jungle, and captives being forced aboard a ship; he wonders whether these images concern the Gold Coast and Annamaboe, but presents them as uncertain impressions, not proof of his birthplace. His reflection turns the missing certainty into a broader problem of origin: a person may be present in the story of their birth without being able to remember it.

The Date in His Life Story

The narrative introduces 1817 as a reported possibility within Washington’s first-person reconstruction of his past, not as a verified chronological fact. He says he has walked the earth for eighteen years and is now a Freeman in possession of his own person, framing the account from a later point in his life while acknowledging the limits of what he can know about its beginning. The date therefore marks an unresolved origin story rather than a settled birth record.