Читать книгу The Logbooks - Anne Farrow - Страница 12

[TWO]

The Haunted Land

MEETING THE SLAVE TRADERS

I met John Easton and Dudley Saltonstall in the spring of 2004 when a friend sent me an article that had been published in the Hartford Times in 1928. He enclosed a brief note that said, “Thought of you.” The article, printed out from microfilm, described the logbooks of three slaving voyages, bound together in a single volume.

The logbooks described two voyages from New London to West Africa, and one voyage from West Africa to an island in the Caribbean, all made between January 1757 and August 1758. The tone of the newspaper article, one of cheerful bonhomie and brave Connecticut mariners, was set by the first sentence:

No Odyssey of the Old Connecticut shipmasters surpasses for romance and danger the bread-and-butter adventures of the Yankee slaver out of New London and the river towns. Bartering rum for Shylock’s “pound of flesh,” filling the wood-bin from the jungle and beating off “hi-jackers” to the trade with grape-shot, they raced back under canvas to American auction-blocks in the attempt to beat the spectre of death.

Despite the article’s exaggerated air of derring-do, which was typical for the time, and the mistaken idea that most Africans were brought directly to the American colonies and “American auction-blocks,” I was intrigued. The idea of Connecticut men commanding slave ships was new to me, despite my state’s proximity to Rhode Island, which was colonial America’s largest transporter of slaves to the Caribbean and the colonies. But no book or scholar during my earlier research had suggested such a possibility to me, so I had not looked for evidence of that commerce. Not seen because not looked for.

My friend had sent me the article because, at the time, I was working as a newspaper reporter at the Hartford Courant but on special assignment to write, with two colleagues, a book about New England’s relationship with human enslavement before the Civil War and after. (The book was published in 2005 by a division of Random House.) I had been studying slavery in Connecticut and New England for almost two years, and knew that Rhode Island men were at the helm of 90 percent of the ships that brought captives to the American South, an estimated 900 ships. The ships always seemed to have pretty names: Charming Susannah; the Swallow; the Greyhound; the names of beautiful wives and beloved daughters, swift birds and virtues. Much later, I found Robert Hayden’s poem about the Middle Passage, the sea voyage from Africa into the place of enslavement, and those dark ships, “their bright ironical names / like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth.”

In the course of researching, I learned that colonial Connecticut had been a major provisioner of the British West Indies plantations where slaves were growing and processing sugar in a monoculture that yielded huge profits to England. Connecticut-grown onions, potatoes, pigs, and cows were considered the best of the best on the Caribbean’s English plantations, and the sturdy white oak we grew also was highly sought after. The horses raised on farms in eastern Connecticut were shipped to the Caribbean in the tens of thousands, and the colony’s newspapers were filled with ads for “fat shipping horses.” These advertisements usually displayed a chubby, prancing horse.

In the same way that sugar agriculture killed enslaved men and women—roughly one-third died in the first thirty-six months after arrival—it also killed the horses sent to plow the fields and turn the wheels of the sugar mills, many living just a single harvest. English settlers made an Eden-like Caribbean into a hell on earth for its enslaved black workers, and Connecticut livestock and produce supported what scholar Gary Nash called “the heartless sugar system.”

When I studied the customs records of colonial Connecticut ships sailing to and returning from the Caribbean, and saw the newspaper advertisements for tropical products such as nutmeg and Madeira and “raizins,” I understood that this was the broad record of human enslavement and suffering. The fortified wines and exotic spices were coming from a place where slaves were worked to death and then replaced because it cost less to import a life from Africa than to raise a child to slavery in the Caribbean. But I had not felt the information I was seeing.

In order to begin to understand, and to be guided by empathy and be changed, I had to cross the street.

I can explain.

The Hartford Courant’s offices are almost within sight of the Connecticut State Library, a massive gray block of a building where the ships’ logs had been since their acquisition from the widow of a North Carolina collector in 1920. I showed the article to my editor at the newspaper, and she said, “Check it out.” Jenifer Frank, who was editing our book as well as writing a chapter on New England’s cotton connections, was deep into her own research and writing. A slender, intense woman with wildly wavy hair and a smile that transforms the severity of her bookish face, Jeni waved her hand at me and said, “Go, go.”

The 250-year-old logs are fragile, and are stored in a temperature-controlled manuscript vault, so the librarian asked me to read them first on microfilm. Microfilm is hard to read, and as I tucked the end of the filmstrip onto the spool, I wondered if I’d find anything to bring back to Jeni, or if I would even be able to decipher the microfilmed pages of eighteenth-century handwriting. I worried that I didn’t have enough background on the slave trade to understand what I would see.

Logbooks, Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library

The basement study room at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford was cool on that steamy May morning, and the tables were packed with genealogists and researchers working to reconstruct their personal histories. I looked at them, bent over their piles of books, and thought, what am I looking for?

The first shock of the logbooks was that the handwriting is easy to read. The log keeper’s hand is relatively large and perfectly legible, and he made a distinctive “d” with the upright stroke of the letter curving to the left over the round part of the letter.

I started calling the narrator Sam, because the name Sam Gould is written in what looks like the same handwriting on the inside cover, and because the newspaper article in 1928 had referred to him that way. His spelling was highly phonetic—“sett” for set, “currant” for current, “breses” for breezes—but spelling was not then standardized in colonial America. Noah Webster’s famous “Blue Back Speller,” the first national attempt to standardize spelling and word usage, was still twenty-five years in the future.

The log keeper was clearly literate, and someone with authority. “In the Africa, John Easton Commander from New London Towards Africa” was written across the top of two facing pages of the first log. I knew that this could not have been John Easton’s own log of the voyage, though he may indeed have kept one. But the handwriting, which seemed to be the same for each of three voyages, noted three different commanders. On a quick read through the logbooks, the organization of the pages, the language used, and the style of the notations all looked the same. A shipwright at Mystic Seaport and my neighbor who had researched maritime life both suggested that this was a private document, being maintained for someone else. The handwriting seemed to match the weather, and was sketchier when seas were rough. Many of these entries would have been written by the light of a guttering candle.

There were many entries I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why, as the ship neared Africa, crewmen were cleaning out the steerage, building an awning, and repairing the “carrages.” What was “ricing” and “the factory” and a “panyar”? Later, I learned that all those terms are particular to a ship engaged in what was called then “the Guinea trade.”

When the ruins on Bence Island were rediscovered in 1947, part of the fortress still had a roof. Now, tall trees grow within the walls. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant

But on page 38 of what appeared to be the second voyage in the logbooks, the log keeper noted, on Wednesday, April 13, “On Board the Good Hope Lying at Bence Island Taking in Rice Slaves Wood & Water.” Similar entries appear for the next three days. Though I was confused about many of the terms, and had no idea where Bence Island might be because it is so small that it does not appear on modern maps, I understood that “taking in slaves” meant trading for human beings and putting them on a ship. And I understood that this set of records could tell me information about the past in its very soul, at the moment this history was lived.

I was about to make a journey of my own, into these logbooks, and I would learn that of the dozens of slave castles that once dotted the West African coast, tiny Bence may have sent as many or more Africans into Southern colonial slavery than any other slaving outpost. And then it vanished from the world’s memory, the jungle claimed the tall walls of the fortress, and trees grew up in the roofless yards where captives were once held in the hundreds for sale. Even my tentative identification of the log keeper, as Samuel Gould, vanished and was replaced by more compelling evidence that surfaced and pointed to an aristocratic colonial named Dudley Saltonstall as the narrator of the tale.

On the other side of the Atlantic and a world away, New England’s slavers and their ships did not become part of the history of American slavery, though they wrote some of its early chapters. These men would be described in their obituaries as West Indies merchants and sea commanders.

Their lost chapters, of which Dudley Saltonstall’s logs are just one, are remarkable for what they contain, but remarkable also for what they illuminate about memory and its power. Working in an era when the slave trade was legal and often lucrative, Saltonstall and Easton would transform the suffering and enslavement of black people into beautiful things for themselves and their families. Neither would have felt he had anything to hide.

Nor did they need to worry. History and the workings of human memory would hide it for them. And in their story of commerce in Africa, I found a larger story and a way to think about American slavery. For almost eighty years, the logbooks sat on a shelf at the state library, waiting to tell their tale, waiting to serve as a symbol of New England’s long forgetting. Their challenge to me has been to use them correctly and ethically in portraying a traumatic past.

Reformer Jane Addams once said that the first function of memory is to sift and reconcile. This, then, would be my work.

ANOTHER CENTURY, NOT MY OWN

In the month when I first read the logbooks, I also found myself single after twenty-five years in two long relationships, one of which had led directly into the other.

Four years earlier, my father had died, and I was helping to care for my mother, whose diagnosis of dementia had made it impossible for her to live independently. It seemed like my whole life was about the past, and about memory. I missed my father so acutely that I still did not really believe he was dead, and every night drove home by the building where he had worked during his career, as if I might see him standing at his bus stop. My mother’s steady decline cracked my heart every day, and my job was all about a story New England seemed to want to forget. I wondered how I had become, at fifty-three, so deeply enmeshed in looking backward and in regret.

I fed a handful of quarters into the microfilm reader and printed out a few pages of the logbooks documenting the purchases of slaves, and took them back to the office of the Sunday magazine to show Jeni. I still had everything to learn about the slave trade, and was sure only that these pages showed people being bought by a man who had started his journey in Connecticut.

Jeni looked at them, then up at me, and said, “Show Rob.”

Robert Forbes, then on the staff of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, had mentored me through a newspaper investigation of Connecticut and slavery and was helping me with our book. Rob is calm and patrician, and wears beautiful tweed jackets; his late father was a scholar on porcelain. An authority on the Missouri Compromise, Rob likes to drive and listens to garage bands in his car.

When I showed him the pages from the logbook, he leaped from his chair. “Where did you get these?” he demanded, repeating, “Bence Island! I can’t believe this! Bence Island!” I had thought Rob might already be familiar with the logs, but he had neither seen nor heard about them. And in the oddly novelistic way the story of these logbooks was unfolding, it turned out that the world authority on Bence Island—a man who had spent almost thirty years studying the island and the eighteenth-century slave trade in the Sierra Leone River—was working in the next room but had just stepped out for lunch.

Joseph Opala takes his mealtimes seriously, and he was having a leisurely lunch that day. I had eventually left Rob, and was piling books and notes into my car, when I heard Rob calling my name as he ran across the courtyard of the Gilder Lehrman Center building. His tie had blown over his shoulder, and he called “Come back! Joe’s back!”

Joseph Opala, a faculty member from James Madison University in Virginia, had spent the spring semester at Yale on a fellowship drafting a plan for the stabilization of Bence Island and its eighteenth-century structures, which in their unprotected state are open to the elements and prey to theft. A strongly built Oklahoman with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and the nature of a contrarian, Joe had visited Bence at the end of a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone during the mid-1970s. Trained as an anthropologist and interested in a past that is better measured in millennia than in centuries, Joe went to see the island simply as a courtesy to the American ambassador. He found a beach covered with the undisturbed remnants of the eighteenth-century slave trade and ruins cloaked in thick vegetation. He also found a story that he could not leave, and in the ruins on Bence Island he found his Troy. He has researched the island’s history for decades, and though forced to flee under a threat of death during the country’s civil war, he returns several times each year.

Joe turned pale when he saw the logbook pages. “Do you have the rest of this?” he asked. “I thought I had seen everything on Bence Island, but I haven’t seen this.” My heart pounding, I said that I didn’t have a copy of the rest of the logbooks, but that I would get one. Joe kept reading the few pages I’d brought, as if he could see more in them than was written there. He was breathing hard, and he walked in circles there in the office, while Rob beamed at him, at both of us.

I drove back to Hartford in an altered state. Something big had happened to me, was happening to me. I knew then that a door had opened, but I didn’t yet understand that sorrow was written over its portal.

THE PAST IN DREAMS

Six months after first seeing the logbooks on microfilm, I was on a plane to Belgium to catch a Swissair flight to West Africa. I had persuaded the management of my newspaper that a missing piece of Connecticut’s history was lying on the ground on an abandoned island off the coast of Sierra Leone.

A photographer and videographer from the newspaper had gone over two weeks earlier to begin photographing and making film of Bence Island. Joseph Opala, who was to be our guide and translator, also had gone over early to hire men who lived on neighboring islands to clear the ruins of the fortress on Bence of their dense vegetation.

My friends at the newspaper asked how I’d persuaded our financially conservative paper to spend thousands on a story that happened 250 years ago. I could tell that many of them thought slavery was a story I needed to get over. The earlier investigation had been published two years before, and the book that followed was nearly finished. “Everything in Connecticut isn’t about slavery,” a columnist said to me, adding that his ancestors were nineteenth-century immigrants and had nothing to do with slavery. “Are you going to write about women?” a reporter asked. “Or how about modern-day slavery?” They were good questions, I knew, but nothing in my twenty-first-century life seemed as important as decoding these eighteenth-century ships’ logs.

And the story of slavery was changing me. Those stolen people had suffered so long ago, and I could not find any place where their particular story was told. Who would speak for them, and why had a place not been made for them in our history? At our hands, they had been sold from the only home they knew into killing labor and suffering, and I was ready to do Jane Addams’s memory work. I couldn’t reconcile yet, but I was plenty ready to sift.

Though newspapers are portrayed in movies as freewheeling and democratic, they are, in my experience, intensely hierarchical and driven by favoritism. In terms of newsroom capital, I didn’t have much. I had been working for New England newspapers for twenty-eight years, and at the Hartford Courant for more than half that time. I’d spent years writing and editing features about homes, gardens, and literary figures, and if people knew me at all, it was for a 1998 series that I’d written about what makes a marriage strong. It was my bad luck that a new editor in chief had joined the newspaper the week the series ran, and he was a hard-news junkie. He hated seeing soft stories on “One,” and I heard that he had described the series at an editors’ meeting as “longer than most marriages.” The newspaper ombudsman wrote a column slamming it as a waste of precious page-one space.

I was nobody’s idea of an investigative reporter. I was just grateful to be included, and I knew that when this project was done, I would probably be assigned to the home and gardening section, writing about crabgrass and hostess gifts. (Within months, I was.)

But in an odd moment of fate that was seeming less and less accidental, a group of lost black men, women, and children had come into my hands, and had made me responsible for bringing their story back. On that day in the library when I had the powerful waking dream of the children being handed up into the slave ship, I realized that I was crying, and a sympathetic genealogist across the table pushed a box of Kleenex toward me and said, “Your people?” And I thought, they are.

Both the captives and their captors began to appear at the edge of my dreams and followed me through the day. In a dream that recurred, I saw a slave ship leaving New London harbor, but I could not read the name on the transom as it sailed away from its anchorage. Looking down from the ship’s high stern, a man in a long coat raised his three-cornered hat to me, and then looked out toward Long Island Sound.

I began to believe that something was guiding this project, and that it was not visible, or any part of Earth. From my friend sending me the news clipping, to the scholar who knew about Bence Island, to the newspaper’s financial support of a backbencher with no reputation, a kind of divine intervention seemed to be at work. When I stepped off the plane in Sierra Leone’s Freetown International Airport, and then waited for hours in a baking airplane hangar where sunlight poured in through hundreds of bullet holes in the tin roof, I knew I was lucky.

HISTORY FOR AN ABANDONED PLACE

And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.

JOSEPH CONRAD

From the air, Bence Island looks so small. It is hard to imagine the enormity of pain it has witnessed. Even when you are on the ground, the island feels small. Only from the water, in a small boat, does it seem to loom above you. The tall ruins of the last fortress, built in 1796 near the end of the island’s long career as a depot for the slave trade, appear to be hiding amid the tall trees. They are there, and then not there.

Bence Island is visible from a hilltop near Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s wracked and refugee-filled capital city. The island seems to curve within the protection of the vastly larger Tasso Island, which also formed part of the slaving archipelago centuries ago.

Early explorers often remarked on the beautiful haze of lavender and green that seems to envelop this part of the Sierra Leone River, and when I first saw tiny Bence in that lavender distance, I did not believe my eyes. The long and haunted story of that small place had become so deeply a part of me, and I had imagined it so often, that I could not believe I was finally seeing it from a hillside in Freetown, nothing between us except some air and water. I thought, I have come so far for you.

It felt like my body was full of tears. I could not bear to leave the hillside, even after Tom Brown, our photographer, and Alan Chaniewski, our videographer, had made their pictures and film.

In a series of letters published in 1788, John Matthews, a former British naval officer who was setting up a private business for trading in slaves on the Sierra Leone coast, described the harbor at Freetown and the river that leads up to Bence Island. It was what I saw, exactly.

Photographed from a hillside in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Bence Island is the small island in the center. The islands around it were part of a slaving archipelago during the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant

“In coming in from the sea in the dry season, few prospects can exceed the Sierra-Leone river,” wrote Matthews. “Before you is the high land of Sierra-Leone rising from the Cape with the most apparent gentle ascent. Perpetual verdure reigns over the whole extent, and the variegated foliage of the different trees, with the shades [shadows] caused by the projecting hills and unequal summits, add greatly to the beauty of the scene.”

This part of Sierra Leone’s coast includes equatorial jungle that feels more dense than the densest New England forest. It is verdant in a way that is hard for Westerners to imagine, and the air is so thick it seems to lie upon your skin. Having grown up in mid-eighteenth-century New London, Dudley Saltonstall would have been familiar with a breeze off the harbor, stone houses, a white steepled church and pasturelands; the African coast would have seemed like the shore of another world, a distant latitude from the burnished leather globe in his father’s study.

Englishman John Matthews was planning to establish a slave trading business in Sierra Leone when he first saw the entrance to the Sierra Leone River. This engraving was published in his book A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa, late in the eighteenth century. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

The next morning, we motored upriver in a small boat borrowed from the American Embassy. The eighteen-mile trip felt like an outing, the wind cool on my face because Gabriel, our pilot, kept the boat zipping along. This stretch of the river is filled with shoals and shifting sandbars, so ships in the era of the logbooks would have picked up a black pilot at a point of land in Freetown called Cape Sierra Leone, but in our light little boat we didn’t have to worry. I admired the lush African coastline and the hills that come down almost to the water, and their gentle slopes. The coastline is punctuated with mangrove trees, which I had read about in the guidebooks of eighteenth-century visitors.

I felt as if I were inside the logbooks’ first journey, seeing what the men on board the slave ships would have seen almost 250 years earlier: the sandy inlets, fallen trees lying in the water, white blossoms winding through vegetation so thick it looked like a wall, and here and there a child, watching us from a small beach.

At 10:00 a.m. it was already nearly 100 degrees and steamy. Sierra Leone has a Muslim majority, and I had arrived during Ramadan, which is carefully observed in the isolated communities we were to visit. Out of respect to local practice and the Africans we met, I wore long sleeves and long pants, and covered my head with a scarf.

On the edges of the river as it grew wider, there were several clusters of old rusted structures that looked as if they might once have been parts of water towers and industrial cranes. I wondered how long they had been there rotting away; they emphasized the sense of emptiness and dereliction that seemed to hang in the sunny air. Much later, I learned that these structures are the ruins of a once-successful operation to move iron ore from a local mine through the deep-water port of Pepel Island. Corruption claimed the project in the 1970s, but the abandoned railways, conveyor belts, and company buildings are still on Pepel, lying in rust and ruin. In my dreams about Sierra Leone, they are always there at the side of the river.

A kind of fear stirred in me as we shifted course and our motorboat approached Bence, which spread before us horizontally. The tall ruins of the fortress are at the northern end of the island, and because they were only partially visible, I felt as if the ruins were watching me.

No one lives on Bence Island now. There was once a deep well, but there has never been electricity or running water. The island’s caretaker, a slender Muslim named Braima Bangura, maintains a wedding-style scrapbook that he asks visitors to sign, but he lives with his family on neighboring Pepel. For safekeeping, he stores the scrapbook in a worn and scratched Ziploc bag.

The local people, many of whom are Temne, one of Sierra Leone’s largest ethnic groups, believe the island is haunted, and will not stay here overnight. When daylight begins to fade, they drift back to their canoes, one by one. They believe that a devil sits on a rock just upriver of the island, and that he can stride across the water to come ashore. The belief is of very long standing, because I read of this devil in an account by an eighteenth-century Englishwoman who first came to the island in 1791. She called him the “old Gentleman.”

The sandy jetty where slave ships sent their longboats ashore and from which captive people were rowed out to ships from Europe and the American colonies is still perfectly visible. The ruins of the fortress are on a small rise to the left of the jetty, and hidden by trees. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant

I slipped down off the side of our boat and waded ashore, the water warm as a bath. The island has that particular silence of abandoned places, but as we walked onto the narrow beach, green monkeys began to scream from the treetops, and insects buzzed loudly. Something moved violently in a canopy palm. Mr. Bangura took my elbow gently, and made a wide gesture of welcome with his other arm, as if inviting me to Bence Island. I looked up at the small rise, a green pathway that leads up to the ruins.

The shore of Bence Island just below the ruins of the slaving fortress is still littered with the detritus of the slave trade, including glass beads, cowrie shells, bits of clay pipes and stone ballast, and fragments of soft-paste porcelain such as this one. This might have been a piece of a plate or platter on which food was served to traders dining at the fortress. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant

I suddenly felt terribly shy in front of my small team, and hoped they would not look at me. I could not say anything and did not want to make eye contact with anyone. I read later that this is how visitors to the death camps feel, but the only thing I felt at that moment was a sense of shame in having come to the island. The buoyancy I had felt at the airport was replaced by the feeling that the island’s suffering history defied my pens and notebooks, and that I was in over my head. (At a college in New Jersey seven years later, a young African American woman said to me, “Did you feel you had the right to just walk into our history?” and I understood that she was asking whether I had felt shame on that first day.) In my pocket, on a scrap of paper, I had written Saltonstall’s words from the logbooks, “Lying at Bence Taking in Slaves Wood & Water,” and I held that tightly as I followed Joseph Opala up to the entrance to the fortress.

I had seen film and photographs of the island in a documentary Joe had helped produce, but I wasn’t prepared for how intact the fortress is. I had imagined piles of rubble and cairns that Joe would interpret, but in the same odd and unexpected way that the logbooks were perfectly legible, Bence Island was not hard to decipher. Its purpose, its layout, and its story did not have to be imagined. It was perfectly clear how the island had worked.

The jetty of stone and gravel that leads onto the beach is the same one that was used during the centuries of the slave trade. This is where the captives, with their arms roped behind them, would have been walked down to the longboats and pushed in. Though the trading of goods for each slave took place in a clearing just outside the fortress, the beach and the jetty are still littered with objects from the slave trade, two centuries after its end. I saw the stems and bowls of clay pipes no longer white but gray with age, and broken pieces of the porcelain transferware that the company agents and traders would have used when dining at the fortress. Brilliant ruby and azure beads of Venetian glass and cowrie shells, once used in payment for human lives, were thick on the ground, as were shards of old bottles. An eighteenth-century cannon, its surface pitted with age, lay on the jetty facing the river. A large old fragment of blue porcelain with the figure of a prancing horse shone in the grass near the water’s edge.

On this jetty, a piece of slavery’s story was lived and suffered. We accept the idea that time changes the layout of streets and waterfronts, and that, for instance, John Easton’s wharf in Middletown no longer exists, and his stretch of riverfront is now a piece of a highway and a grassy verge. But this jetty was that jetty, the same one he and Saltonstall crossed; that sameness seemed to obliterate time itself. Seamen smoked their long clay pipes while men and women were shoved toward the longboats beached on the gravel shore. For most of those men and women and children, this small piece of land would have been their last moment on African soil, and though the place is now deserted and has the emptied-out atmosphere of a ruin, it is easy to imagine when it rang with commerce and the business it was about. The island was once a hive of activity, and its air, now so still, would have been pierced by shouts and cries.

We walked up to the clearing outside the main entrance. Joe explained that captives would be brought out from where they were held inside the fortress, and then examined for sale. For ten days before my arrival, men from nearby islands had been clearing the walls of dense vines and other vegetation so that we could make film and photographs of the ruins, and so that I could understand the layout. Joe had said that the fortress walls would tell me the story of what had happened here. Dark and rough with age, scabbed with tropical moss and lichen, the brick walls still have the power to frighten. These ruins are from the last slaving castle built on Bence Island, the last of perhaps as many as six fortresses, and was finished in 1796. The castle where Saltonstall and Easton traded in the 1750s was destroyed by the French in 1779. The fortress that followed that one also was destroyed by the French, but this last was, like all the others, built on the original site and the oldest footprint.

The exterior of the fort would have been covered with a white stucco that made the structure gleam, even from a distance. Made from ground white oyster shells, the bright stucco was not used on the inner walls of the slave yards, which were not for show.

Bence Island was a slave trading depot managed by Great Britain, the slave trade’s international leader for centuries, so even though the island is a tiny place, it appears often in eighteenth-century reports, letters, and journals. As we walked on the island, I remembered fragments of the vivid accounts I had read.

Barry Unsworth, who relied heavily on the journal of mid-eighteenth-century English slave ship captain John Newton in writing his novel Sacred Hunger—Newton traded at Bence in the 1750s and lived on nearby Plantain Island for nearly a year—describes a slaving fortress that could only have been Bence Island: “On a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. [The narrator] made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white—the colours of the Company.”

Two centuries ago, the outer brick walls of the fortress on Bence Island were coated with a white stucco made locally of oyster shells. The white exterior was designed to impress, and the slave ships arriving for trade would have seen the fortress gleaming in the distance. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant

Englishwoman Anna Maria Falconbridge was the first white woman to write an account of life in Sierra Leone during the late eighteenth century, the pivotal period when England began to move away from the slave trade. She visited the fortress that stood here in 1791 and 1792, and said it had a “formidable” appearance. “I suppose it is about one hundred feet in length, and thirty in breadth,” she wrote in her memoir, “and contains nine rooms, on one floor, under which are commodious cellars and store rooms; to the right is the kitchen, forge, &c., and to the left other necessary buildings, all of country stone, and surrounded with a prodigious thick lofty wall.”

As late as 1805, just before Great Britain withdrew from its position at the helm of the world slave trade and became one of the trade’s most ardent opponents, English traveler Joseph Corry visited the island and wrote of its “elegant range of buildings and store-houses, which, with great propriety, may be considered as one of the most desirable positions upon the windward coast of Africa.”

This circa 1727 map of Bence Island shows the footprint of the fortress at the time when it was under the management of the Royal African Company of England. When John Easton and Dudley Saltonstall visited the island in 1757, a consortium of British and Scottish businessmen had been running the slave trading operations since 1748 and had made of them a great success. Drawing of Bence Island, Sierra Leone, image Reference “Mariners 18,” as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library

Richard Oswald, a Scot, and Henry Laurens, an American from South Carolina, made fortunes from the slave trade conducted here but never set foot on the island. Oswald, head of a London-based consortium of merchants who leased Bence from the local African kings, and Laurens, who bought hundreds of Sierra Leoneans to work on rice farms in the American South, were traders on a global scale. They participated in the slave trade with great success, but never felt this rocky shore under their buckled shoes or saw the towering mangrove trees. They never smelled the marshy stink of this earth.

In the logbooks and in the culture of the slave trade, this place was called, simply, “the factory.” Saltonstall wrote on April 15, “This Day I Dind & Suped at the factory with Capt. John Stephens.” (This is probably the same John Stephens, a slave ship captain, who worked directly for Oswald and his associates.) Substantial slaving outposts were often called factories, and their lead agents were called factors. These words remind me, always, that the slave trade was a business.

Company agents and military men came to Bence to manage the complex business of bringing captive people here from inland and hundreds of miles north and south of the island. The imprisonment, maintenance, and sale of those thousands of captive people also created work. There would have been accountants from England, and men who could build barrels and repair structures of wood and brick. There would have been white men and free blacks who plied the coastline in company vessels, scouting for captives to bring and sell at Bence. There would have been a doctor, though probably not a very good one. Sierra Leone’s malarial climate was considered hazardous to whites, and at one time the country was nicknamed “The White Man’s Grave.” Bence Island, despite its popularity, many amenities, and success as a slave trading center, was a hardship post, and heavy drinking—drinking “away their senses,” in trader John Newton’s words—seems to have been part of daily life.

Forty years later, American slave trader Joseph Hawkins described the factors at an English slaving fortress south of Bence Island on the Rio Nunez by saying that as the day grew hotter, “The sacrifices to Bacchus commenced, with what they called a whetter before dinner. Some of our company, however, had been rather earlier at their devotions.” Hawkins’s description made me laugh, but I wondered, too, if being an agent of another’s misery—or, in the case of traders and factors, the misery of hundreds and even thousands—in an environment as alien from Bristol, England, or Newport, Rhode Island, as one could find—would not lead to the kind of sustained drinking that erases guilt and feeling. A small glass of Madeira wasn’t going to do it.

The main entrance to the fortress at Bence had an arched doorway, and beyond it I could see a large field.

In the month before visiting Sierra Leone, I had read of how the slaves were examined for sale. In 1721 the Royal African Company had sent a doctor named John Atkins to make a survey of all company holdings on the upper western coast of Africa, and to report on the slave trade, the customs of the tribal groups, and the life—both botanical and zoological—of the various regions of the coast. A surgeon in the British Royal Navy, Atkins also was to report on the slave trade in Brazil—he spelled it Brasil—and the West Indies. Atkins brought with him many of the prejudices common to an Englishman of his day, but he was an intrepid traveler, and had a keen eye.

He witnessed the “very dejected” condition of the captives being brought forth for sale at Bence Island and at the private traders on the shore just opposite the island’s northern end. While there, Atkins saw a man given “an unmerciful Whipping,” with a strap made from the rough hide of a manatee, for refusing to be examined by a trader. The man was a tribal leader who had already killed two slave traders, Atkins explained, and he would have been beaten to death except for his evident strength and courage, which had commercial value.

“He seemed to disdain his Fellow-Slaves for their Readiness to be examined,” the surgeon wrote, “and as it were scorned to look at us, refusing to rise or stretch out his Limbs, as the Master commanded.” The man bore his beating “with Magnanimity, shrinking very little, and shedding a Tear or two, which he endeavor’d to hide, as though ashamed of.”

Sixty years later, Sierra Leone trader John Matthews described the way he saw trade conducted at Bence and other locations, and wrote that once the captive was carefully examined for imperfections, the traders got down to brass tacks. “If approved, you then agree upon the price at so many bars, and then give the dealer so many flints or stones to count with.” Iron bars were a kind of baseline currency in the slave trade, and their value fluctuated in response to time, location, and supply. All commodities were valued in these bars—from rum, tobacco, and gold dust to cloth, muskets, and human beings.

The beach had been covered with rough-edged ballast stones and flints, too.

THE SCREAMING MAN

We walked into the large, brick-walled yard where the men would have been held, sometimes for many days, exposed to the heat and rain. The ground was rough, and patched with weeds and small trees. The sun felt merciless, and the surrounding walls were very tall, making the yard airless and chokingly hot. On a visit to the island in 1791, Anna Maria Falconbridge had strolled to the windows of Bance Island House, as the fortress was then called, and looked down into this enclosure from the cool upper room where she was about to enjoy dinner.

Involuntarily I strolled to one of the windows a little before dinner, without the smallest suspicion of what I was to see;—judge then what my astonishment and feelings were, at the sight of between two hundred and three hundred wretched victims, chained and parceled out in circles, just satisfying the cravings of nature from a trough of rice placed in the centre of each circle.