“broacht.” The men ate beef, pork, mackerel, and mutton, all salted, as well as a hard cracker called “ship’s bread,” and potatoes.
The crew would have been small, probably not more than eight men. Saltonstall noted in his log the tasks at which the men were employed throughout the day. Subject to the worst hardships of ship-board life as well as the dangers of the slave trade, these seamen were from the lowest ranks of colonial life, and they were driven hard. A neighbor of mine who was an expert on maritime history read the logbooks and said, “You wouldn’t have wanted to give these men too much time to think.” On the coast of Africa, a seaman named Denis Bryan would try to desert but was captured on shore and brought back to the ship in chains.
English commander John Newton, who served as master on three slaving voyages to the same stretch of African coastline and during the same decade as Easton and Saltonstall, wrote that the world of the slave ship was one governed by harsh practice, and that “a savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself into those who exercise power on board an African slave-ship.” A slave ship was, in every sense and for nearly all on board, an oceangoing prison.
Logbooks, Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library
The ocean crossing could have been narrated by Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of Patrick O’Brian’s maritime novels. The Africa weathered wild seas, blizzards, and gale winds. The heavy longboat, to be used for trading ashore, tipped over in its chocks and had to be righted; that same January day, a seaman named Waterman got his hand caught in the mainsail’s block and tackle, and his fingernails were torn off.
But by the second week of March, Saltonstall was recording visits to slaving outposts on islands near the African coast. He sent ashore 187 feet of New England white oak and eight casks of rum to the governor of St. Jago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands and a major center for the slave trade. This gift was a gesture of generosity, one designed to open the way for trading. Like enslavement itself, the slave trade rested on a system of extreme violence, but it had its social conventions, and successful traders observed them.
Captain 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
