The Logbooks. Anne Farrow
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wrote in his log that the ship was lying at Bence Island “Taking in Slaves Wood & Water.” He was to sail with the Good Hope’s commander, Alexander Urqhart, to the Caribbean island of St. Croix via St. Christopher’s with a cargo of 169 slaves. Saltonstall may have changed ships because of his health. He mentions having a “fitt” aboard the Africa and dislocating the right side of his jaw. Medical attention would have been readily available on St. Christopher’s, which was a popular port of call for New London mariners, second only to Barbados. Saltonstall also mentions having fits during the last of the three voyages in the logbooks, one so severe that he lost consciousness.
Easton’s destination was also St. Christopher’s, or St. Kitt’s as it is called today, but the commander evidently thought the prices for captives at Bence Island too high, and he headed south and east to Cape Coast Castle, an English trading fort on what was then called the Gold Coast and today is Ghana. Cape Coast Castle—which figures largely in the last slaving voyage in Saltonstall’s narrative—was, in effect, Great Britain’s home office for its slave trade in Africa for nearly a century and a half. A large fortress perched on rocks above the South Atlantic, Cape Coast would have been perfectly familiar to a captain with Easton’s experience, and he would have sailed its waters like a road. Indeed, the navigational pathway in front of this and other trading centers was often called, simply, “the Rhode.”
The information that survives about the rest of the Africa’s voyage is that the ship reached St. Kitts the following December with 100 slaves to disembark. John Easton had been at sea for nearly eleven months. British custom at the time was for a vessel to carry several slaves for each ton of the ship’s capacity, though this practice was not law and was frequently disregarded in favor of “close packing” of slaves. The length of Easton’s time on the African coast and the low per-ton ratio—100 captives in a 110-ton vessel—suggest that this was not a profitable voyage, but one that he drew to a close to preserve the lives already on board. (According to an earlier record, Easton landed his 100 captives in Jamaica.)
Dudley Saltonstall, who would later serve as master of the Africa and later still be held responsible for the greatest maritime disaster of the American Revolution and one of the sorriest episodes in American naval history, took his logbook with him and left the Africa. As the pages in the logbooks show, he was about to sail into a nightmare.
“HOW DID YOU FIND ME?”
At 7:00, the hour on an August night when light begins to fade, my mother turned in her narrow bed and peered up into my face. I knew she was trying to place me. Some days, I was her sister, a college-educated secretary who had died young. Other days, I was her mother, a punishing woman who had died twenty-five years earlier and to whom my mother still wrote every week, despite her illness, to apologize for being out of touch. Mama would write the address of her childhood home on the envelope.
“Am I alive?” she often would ask me, trusting that the tall, white-haired woman at her bedside, a woman who was familiar in a way she could not describe, would be able to tell her. I had expected her to forget who I was, but had not understood that she would also forget who she was.
Without a stable memory of the events of her long life, with neither a past nor a future, she drifted in the present, each day seeking a coherent explanation as to who she might be. Without a personal history to center her and give her purpose, she began her utterly unfamiliar life over again every day in the supervised residence she called, simply, “the place.” She was always surprised that I knew where she lived, asking, “How did you find me?”
We could no longer share family stories because I was from a family she did not remember, so I talked to her about my research into the history of New England and slavery. I told her about my work on a set of eighteenth-century ships’ logs that held a long-submerged piece of the Connecticut story.
Before dementia, in the life when she played Chopin and read all the books for my college English courses, my mother had loved history. Sitting on the edge of her bed that August evening, I explained to her that the names in the ships’ logs had led me to old newspapers, probate inventories, and land records, and that in those old documents I found other men and other ships linked to the slave trade in Africa. I told her that a professor from Connecticut College had called one morning to say, “I hear you found the smoking gun.”
“I am going to Africa to see the island where the man who kept the ships’ logs bought slaves,” I said to my mother, explaining that I needed to see the island and walk in its ruins, and to stand where human beings had been bought and sold. I told her that the island had been abandoned for two centuries, and was considered a haunted place.
I didn’t want to frighten her, but to include her in my work, as she had been included when she was well. These ships had sailed from a colonial port whose history had always fascinated us both. On a day when I had first read in the logbooks of children being purchased, I had had an olfactory and auditory experience so powerful that I forgot I was at a table in the state library and thought, for a long moment, that I was in Africa, seeing tiny black children as they were handed up into the ships from longboats that rode low in the water, gulls screaming overhead as the seamen reaching down to grasp small, smooth brown arms. When I told my mother about it, she murmured, as if heartsick, “Oh, those children.”
Her beautiful eyes were wide, and the tree outside her window was just a shape in the darkness. She was trying to remember what I was telling her, sentence by sentence. She was hearing every word.
“Is it terrible?” she asked. “Are you afraid?”
[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.