March 4th, 2008, 05:29 PM
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The Black Rock was allegedly owned and run by the British trading group the New World Sea Traders. The slave trade had been outlawed in 1807, however slavery was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833. The company owned a fleet of fifteen ships, including a frigate, two sloops, and three slave ships. The Black Rock may have been one of these slave ships, though they were sold in 1882, a year after the Black Rock disappeared according to Lost Experience sources, suggesting the company may have had actually sixteen ships pre-1881.
The New World Sea Traders was owned and operated by Magnus Hanso, a former ship's captain who became a business entrepreneur. While no direct ownership has been stated, it is known that the Black Rock sailed out of slip 23 in Portsmouth docks, and Hanso's trading group managed slips 18 to 27. [1](although Portsmouth harbor in Britain has been a naval port since the mid 1700s. From 1808 the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, who were tasked to stop the slave trade, operated out of Portsmouth).
A different look of the Black Rock, from The Lost ExperienceAccording to articles revealed by Rachel Blake, the Black Rock disappeared in 1881, on a return voyage from a gold mining operation in the South Indian Ocean. Perhaps more interesting than the fact the ship was lost were the circumstances preceding and following its disappearance. According to traders on Papua New Guinea, the ship sailed away from port in an Easterly direction, rather than West to Africa, where it would exchange gold from the mines in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea for more slaves. According to the ship's manifest that was discovered, the Black Rock initially sailed from (and was supposed to return to) slip 23 in Portsmouth, Britain -- but no shipping company claimed ownership. A crew of some 40 men, along with an uncounted number of slaves, was presumably lost at sea.[2] Magnus Hanso was known to still have a hands-on passion for the sea and insisted on captaining several voyages every year. It is likely that he was captaining the Black Rock himself when the ship disappeared, based on the note on the blast door map.
The sale of the company in 1882 to the East Ocean Trade Group saw the remainder of the New World Sea Traders slaving and military vessels converted to legitimate trading ships. In the 1950s, the Hanso Group purchased the East Ocean Trade Group, and renamed it to the Allied Copenhagen Marine Merchants. (Rachel Blake Copenhagen 02)
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This was actually from the first game - "The Lost Experience"
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So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
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