The Logbooks. Anne Farrow
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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.
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