# CATHERINE MULGRAVE-ZIMMERMANN  
Maureen Warner-Lewis  
In March 1833, a young girl named Ngeve was out walking, playing and fishing on the seafront in Luanda, Angola, in the company of her sisters and a male cousin. ${ }^{1}$ 'Ngeve', from ongeve, meaning 'hippopotamus' in the Umbundu language of southern Angola, was the traditional female name for the secondborn of a pair of twins; the other twin would have been named Njamba, after onjamba ("elephant"). We assume the twins to have been with the group of children on the seafront, but it is unclear whether both were among those lured by sailors into a boat and carried out to a large ship riding the waves offshore. The schooner, the Heroina, had sailed out from São Tomé, an island off the Central African coast bound for Havana, Cuba, with a load of 303 slaves destined for the plantations and residences of that Caribbean island, captained by a Portuguese man named Sabino. ${ }^{2}$ The Portuguese had colonized both São  
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[^0]:    1 The account of Ngeve's childhood, enslavement and experience of a shipwreck was given by Catherine Mulgrave-Zimmermann to her second husband, Johannes Zimmermann, who then relayed it to the Basel Mission in a letter dated 18 November 1852. The letter was translated into English by Mary Kuck. For a transcription of the letter in German, see Lovejoy (2010, Appendix A): https://doczz.fr/ doc/1369155/the-provenance-of-catherine-mulgrave-zimmermann (Accessed 12 June 2022.)
2 In a 2006 comment on my research findings, Paul Lovejoy noted that the Heroina was not mentioned in Eltis et al. (1999). However, he did point out that there were ships captained in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s by persons named João Sabino and J. Sabino leaving out of Bahia and São Tomé and operating in the Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, and western Central Africa.  
Tomé and Angola (from 1470 and 1575 respectively) and there were close family, commercial and shipping ties between the neighbouring colonies.