The Logbooks

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Anne Farrow. The Logbooks

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The Logbooks

This book is a 2014 selection in the Driftless Connecticut Series, for an outstanding book in any field on a Connecticut topic or written by a Connecticut author.

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In a trade rife with lethal aspects, the slave trade also faced a natural deadline. The rainy season, which began each May and lasted until late October, made that part of the African coast almost unnavigable because of the high waters. A ship that stayed more than six months on the coast of Upper Guinea faced increasing losses. Crewmen and officers fell to malaria and yellow fever, the suffering of the captives already in the hold increased and their health worsened—rendering them a loss to the owners—and supplies of trade goods were exhausted. A crew decimated by disease and desertion was less able to maintain control over the ship’s human cargo, who frequently fought back against their captivity.

Easton and Saltonstall appear to have moored the Africa near a tiny island called Plantain and set out for the fortress at Bence in the longboat they had christened the Pompy. The shifting sandbars of the Sierra Leone River are famously treacherous, and Bence, situated about eighteen miles upriver, is at the limit of navigation for even small ships. It was safer to navigate the archipelago of slaving islands in a small vessel, with a black pilot hired at Cape Sierra Leone. It was also at this point on April 11 that a seaman named Denis Bryan appears to have had enough of the slaving trade. He was probably one of the men rowing the longboat to and from the fortress, because he attempted to desert from the Pompy at 11:00 that morning, but Saltonstall reports that “[we] catcht him & Put him in Irons & Sent him in the Pompy to the Plantins [Plantain Island] where the Africa lay.”

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