The Logbooks. Anne Farrow
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Easton went ashore with the gifts but returned, discouraged, and reported that trade was not to be had on terms he regarded as reasonable. An Irish trader who lived on the coast of Sierra Leone and knew Easton during the 1750s said the Middletown man grew impatient if a deal couldn’t be made quickly.
The Africa, a ten-year-old Connecticut-built ship of Dutch design called a snow, was a slaving ship at the very height of the international slave trade, which lasted from the late fifteenth century until the last decades of the nineteenth—nearly 400 years. Of the estimated 12.5 million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas, more than half were sold between 1701 and 1800, and of that 52.4 percent, tens of thousands more were sold during the second half of the eighteenth century than during the first.
Capt. Easton sent ashore 187 feet of white oak boards and eight gallons of rum as a gift for the governor of the slave trading center at an island off the African coast, but wasn’t able to establish terms for trade. Logbooks, Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library
The slaving fortresses south and east of Sierra Leone, in what today is Ghana, have become more famous than the stretch of coastline where Easton and Saltonstall began their trading voyage aboard the Africa, but the Windward Coast was the one that slave ships would encounter first in their voyage, so it appears often in narratives of mariners and other visitors.
Research on the demographics of slavery—how many people were taken from which region, in what time period, and where they were sent—has made significant advances in the past few decades, and a database of the transatlantic slave trade has been built by scholars from England and the United States. Constantly updated with information from museums, university scholars, and period documents that come to light, the database contained in mid-2013 approximately 35,000 voyages, which its creators estimate may be 80 percent of all voyages made. From the Sierra Leone region, which in Easton and Saltonstall’s day included parts of what are now Liberia, Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau, an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 captives were taken.
Between 1751 and 1775—almost precisely the span of John Easton’s career as a slave ship captain—more Africans were sold into slavery than during any other period of the entire transatlantic slave trade. The accepted estimate is that during those twenty-four years, 63,000 people were sold out of Africa every year, or, to use the slavers’ expression, “sent off from the coast.”
The competition to buy healthy men, women, and children was fierce, and the literature of the slave trade is full of the bitter complaints of captains who felt they were being cheated by the black traders and English agents, although the captains also were trying to get the most for the least. On this first voyage in the logbooks, John Easton was assembling a human cargo destined for sugar plantations on St. Kitts, a Caribbean island with rich soil, heavy rainfalls, and cool temperatures. Sugar had been, at that point, cultivated on the island for more than a century.
As was customary for many slave ship captains of that time, Easton “slaved” his ship in a very deliberate way, but not from any single source. Saltonstall noted slaves being rowed out to the Africa for inspection and possible purchase, and the captain going ashore at the beachfront outposts of black traders where groups of potential slaves had been brought for sale and were held in filthy pens.
Easton also pursued the more dangerous slave-gathering method of going ashore in the longboat and navigating the crocodile-filled African rivers that were lined with independent traders who were black, white, and mulatto. “Boating,” as it was called, exposed the captain and the seamen who accompanied him to being cut off from the ship, killed, and having their trade goods stolen. English muskets were a prime article of trade, and at this point in the commerce of slavery, both the traders from ships and the traders onshore were armed.
More than thirty years earlier, in 1726, British cartographer William Smith was commissioned to make a full report of the slaving operations, people, wildlife, and trade on the Sierra Leone coast, and he saw an armed Africa up close. “No sooner had [the chief mate] left me, and got out of Sight, and Call, but I was quickly surrounded by the savage Natives, who were all arm’d, either with Javelins, Bows, or Poison’d Arrows, or European Guns.”
Easton had acquired twelve captives, five of them children, but trade was still slow when Saltonstall noted on the sixth day of April that they were “under Sail bound for Serrelone.”
Sierra Leone, a country on the upper western coast of Africa, had been known as a center friendly to ships and trade since the mid-sixteenth century, when Englishman John Hawkins, a dashing adventurer and favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, stopped there to trade for captives—also taking them by force from foreign vessels where they were already held—and to fill his casks with the fresh water that flowed out of the mountainsides.
Sierra Leone became a locus of the slave trade in the sixteenth century, when English adventurer and mariner John Hawkins, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, seized Africans, made them captives, and shipped them to Hispaniola. Visitors to the country, which was named by the Portuguese for the mountains that looked like reclining lions, often remarked on the beauty of its coastline. From the author’s collection
By the mid-1750s, Europeans had been trading in Sierra Leone steadily for a century, and since the 1670s, there had been a slaving fortress on a small island situated near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. The island had different names at different times, but was always a slaving enterprise. On old French maps, it sometimes appears as a tiny dot with the words “Fort Anglais,” or English fort. Because I first saw the name as Bence Island, that is what I call it, though it was called Bance Island during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and today is called Bunce Island.
In 1726 cartographer Smith described the beautiful bay that Easton and Saltonstall saw before making their way upriver to Bence Island in 1757. “The next Morning, we found ourselves in a small pleasant Bay, surrounded with exceeding high Hills, all cover’d with tall beautiful Trees, swarming with various Kinds of Birds, which, as soon as Day broke, made the Woods ring…. In this Bay is extraordinary good fresh Water, which, gushing out of the Rocks on the Side of the Hill, comes down like a Spout, so that we could fill all our casks.”
By the time Easton and Saltonstall anchored the Africa in Frenchman’s Bay, an inlet in what is now Freetown Harbor near a point of land called Cape Sierra Leone, a clock began to tick. This invisible but very real clock had begun ticking when the ship reached Sierra Leone, and it had a death’s head painted on its face.
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.”
With Easton’s permission, Saltonstall