This image has been circulating heavily this year, mostly in posts marking Juneteenth. But it’s not quite what it looks like. https://twitter.com/calamity_jt/status/1274041814987620352

In the context it’s being used, it seems like a reference to Africans who jumped from ships to escape from a life in bondage. That’s a powerful image.

But if you look for the monument you’ll find it’s located in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Not exactly a hotspot for slavery memorials.

So then, you might think, this is part of the Pilgrim Path, commemorating a bunch of white people voluntarily crossing the sea so they could pursue their unique brand of religious fanaticism. Which would be very much not the spirit in which the image has been circulating.

But if you search for an image of the whole monument, you’ll find that there’s more than one plaque on the stone.
The second plaque, if you poke around and find an image you can zoom in on, tells you the monument was erected by the “Friends of Dougie Thurber.”

Dougie Thurber died after a fishing accident in Plymouth Harbour in 1980, because the search and rescue helicopter that pulled him out of the water couldn’t transport him directly to the hospital—there wasn’t a helipad for them to land.
http://www.bidplymouth.org/history-of-medflight

“Those who chose the sea” here is the equivalent of “Those who go down to the sea in ships” in UK parlance: it’s the people who work on the ocean, fishing, shipping, and search and rescue.
These are high risk jobs, but choosing the sea is not choosing certain death.

So here’s where it gets interesting.
The Dougie Thurber memorial, in its physical context next to Plymouth Harbour, is not really an ambiguous monument. But its circulation as an image has revealed the availability of an entirely different set of meanings and associations.

It might be tempting to hear this and conclude that people are circulating the image of the memorial out of ignorance, or a lack of respect for its “real” (physical) context.

But The Internet is a place, too; culture circulates here just as much, if not more than, the physical world. What people see online forms part of their worldview; it becomes reality.

I’m not saying this is a unambiguously positive development; I’m just saying that it IS.

And “Those who chose the sea” means two different things in two different contexts even though the same physical site is the origin of both.

And at a guess I would say a lot more people associate it with slavery than with a helipad in Plymouth. That interpretation has, at the moment, a stronger claim to reality than the interpretation anchored at the physical site...

...though the physical site will of course continue to exist and thus complicate claims about the image’s singular meaning.

This isn’t a question of one story of what the image means being real and the other fake. It’s an excellent example of how two distinct ideas of reality can share the same anchor.

A lot of people think that the purpose of cultural history is uncovering the singular, true meaning of images or monuments or texts. It isn’t, and it can’t be, because no thing that is interesting enough to be worth studying has a singular true meaning.

Our job is to give an account of how multiple meanings develop and persist in tension with each other.