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 boarded a smaller vessel, a sloop called the Good Hope, which was anchored at Bence. For the next week, Saltonstall 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
