which were not for show.
Bence Island was a slave trading depot managed by Great Britain, the slave trade’s international leader for centuries, so even though the island is a tiny place, it appears often in eighteenth-century reports, letters, and journals. As we walked on the island, I remembered fragments of the vivid accounts I had read.
Barry Unsworth, who relied heavily on the journal of mid-eighteenth-century English slave ship captain John Newton in writing his novel Sacred Hunger—Newton traded at Bence in the 1750s and lived on nearby Plantain Island for nearly a year—describes a slaving fortress that could only have been Bence Island: “On a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. [The narrator] made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white—the colours of the Company.”
Two centuries ago, the outer brick walls of the fortress on Bence Island were coated with a white stucco made locally of oyster shells. The white exterior was designed to impress, and the slave ships arriving for trade would have seen the fortress gleaming in the distance. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
Englishwoman Anna Maria Falconbridge was the first white woman to write an account of life in Sierra Leone during the late eighteenth century, the pivotal period when England began to move away from the slave trade. She visited the fortress that stood here in 1791 and 1792, and said it had a “formidable” appearance. “I suppose it is about one hundred feet in length, and thirty in breadth,” she wrote in her memoir, “and contains nine rooms, on one floor, under which are commodious cellars and store rooms; to the right is the kitchen, forge, &c., and to the left other necessary buildings, all of country stone, and surrounded with a prodigious thick lofty wall.”
As late as 1805, just before Great Britain withdrew from its position at the helm of the world slave trade and became one of the trade’s most ardent opponents, English traveler Joseph Corry visited the island and wrote of its “elegant range of buildings and store-houses, which, with great propriety, may be considered as one of the most desirable positions upon the windward coast of Africa.”
This circa 1727 map of Bence Island shows the footprint of the fortress at the time when it was under the management of the Royal African Company of England. When John Easton and Dudley Saltonstall visited the island in 1757, a consortium of British and Scottish businessmen had been running the slave trading operations since 1748 and had made of them a great success. Drawing of Bence Island, Sierra Leone, image Reference “Mariners 18,” as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library
Richard Oswald, a Scot, and Henry Laurens, an American from South Carolina, made fortunes from the slave trade conducted here but never set foot on the island. Oswald, head of a London-based consortium of merchants who leased Bence from the local African kings, and Laurens, who bought hundreds of Sierra Leoneans to work on rice farms in the American South, were traders on a global scale. They participated in the slave trade with great success, but never felt this rocky shore under their buckled shoes or saw the towering mangrove trees. They never smelled the marshy stink of this earth.
In the logbooks and in the culture of the slave trade, this place was called, simply, “the factory.” Saltonstall wrote on April 15, “This Day I Dind & Suped at the factory with Capt. John Stephens.” (This is probably the same John Stephens, a slave ship captain, who worked directly for Oswald and his associates.) Substantial slaving outposts were often called factories, and their lead agents were called factors. These words remind me, always, that the slave trade was a business.
Company agents and military men came to Bence to manage the complex business of bringing captive people here from inland and hundreds of miles north and south of the island. The imprisonment, maintenance, and sale of those thousands of captive people also created work. There would have been accountants from England, and men who could build barrels and repair structures of wood and brick. There would have been white men and free blacks who plied the coastline in company vessels, scouting for captives to bring and sell at Bence. There would have been a doctor, though probably not a very good one. Sierra Leone’s malarial climate was considered hazardous to whites, and at one time the country was nicknamed “The White Man’s Grave.” Bence Island, despite its popularity, 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
