Sambo's Grave is the burial site of a young African cabin boy or slave, in the small village of Sunderland Point, England, near Heysham and Overton, Lancashire. Sunderland Point used to be a port, serving cotton, sugar and slave ships from the West Indies and North America. The grave, while not a tourist attraction in itself, is a site of interest which many locals travel to see, and perhaps contemplate the sad story that brought Sambo so far from his home. While travelling with his enslaver in 1736, Sambo died from a disease contracted from contact with Europeans, to which he had no natural immunity (although some more romanticised stories say that he died of a broken heart when his enslaver left him there). He was buried in unconsecrated ground (as he was not a Christian) on the weatherbeaten shoreline of Morecambe Bay. Today, the grave almost always bears flowers or stones painted by the local children. While initially unmarked, over the years the grave has been slowly added to, and now bears a plaque that reads:
Full many a Sand-bird chirps upon the Sod
And many a moonlight Elfin round him trips
Full many a Summer's Sunbeam warms the Clod
And many a teeming cloud upon him drips.
But still he sleeps -- till the awakening Sounds
Of the Archangel's Trump now life impart
Then the GREAT JUDGE his approbation founds
Not on man's COLOUR but his worth of heart. Sunderland Point itself is a very small community, and is only accessible via a narrow road which crosses a salt marsh and is cut off at high tide.
